Mon, Sep 04, 2006 page11

• Analysis: Google's hatching a new idea while you read this

  • By John Naughton / THE OBSERVER
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  Google Inc is like a mad inventor on steroids. Scarcely a week goes by without it unveiling yet another wheeze to put someone else out of business. The converse also applies: if Google says it wants to be your friend -- as with eBay recently -- your share price goes up. But in the main most of Google's announcements involve plans to eat somebody's lunch.

  In the past two weeks, for example, it let slip that it has researchers working on computer-based monitoring of ambient noise (to pick up information about what TV programs are being watched and extract ad-related data from the real-time transcript). This has the TV industry in a lather.

  Then there was the announcement of "Google apps [applications] for your domain," aimed squarely at small organizations currently condemned to running Microsoft e-mail and office software.

  "Now you can offer private labelled e-mail, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free," the blurb said, "so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's Web site, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."

  The pitch to schools was even stronger: "Get your campus talking. Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative e-mail, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free. You can select any combination of our available services, and customize them with your school's logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy Web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems -- and it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."

  Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Google made more waves by announcing an escalation of its Book Search program. Now, in addition to being able to search and read out-of-copyright works online, you can download and print the complete text free of charge. Since 2004 Google has been scanning books, including volumes submitted by publishers and others drawn from the shelves of the New York Public Library, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Michigan.

  Google won't say how many books it has scanned to date, but it's probably already several million. The destination is clear, even if it's still some way off: a comprehensive bridge between the offline and online world, with every book that has ever been published available online -- via Google.

  Needless to say, publishers are up in arms about this, and my learned friends are conferring on the matter. The download announcement doesn't really affect these discussions, because the books in question are clearly out of copyright.

  The Google scheme differs from the wonderful Project Gutenberg, a charitable scheme that has been making out-of-copyright works freely available online for years by offering the downloads in printer-friendly PDF form rather than the raw text format favored by the Gutenberg folks.

  This has two drawbacks: first, there are digital rights management facilities built into PDF, so it's not a truly open format; and second, PDF files can be enormous. BusinessWeek tried downloading the 717-page PDF of A Tale of Two Cities, for example, and found its network choking on the 32.2 megabyte file. The corresponding plain-text file from Gutenberg weighs in at a mere 0.78 megabytes (or 0.29 in compressed form). And you can read the text file on your iPod.

  So the new Google service isn't such a big deal. In any event, it will doubtless be eclipsed by another announcement from Google soon.

  At the root of the Google phenomenon is the fact that the firm has more money than it knows what to do with and employs an astonishing galaxy of talent. It gives each employee a day a week to work on their own projects, the genesis of many of the new services it is rolling out. Time for news agencies to think about appointing Google correspondents?
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