Author: Michael C. Habib

I am live-blogging this from UNC-Chapel Hill where the Health Sciences Library is hosting a talk by Craig Silverstein (Google’s first employee and Director of Technology) titled, “Organizing the World’s Information: Google’s Vision for the 21st Century”. Please pardon the lack of editing. Tickets ran out a while ago. I procrastinated and was lucky to get a seat in the overflow section watching a live feed of the event.

I missed the intro. the wireless was messed up in all the auditoriums. I was able to make it into the balcony though.

Craig had a little problem with the powerpoint and joked about having problems with technology. Craig is giving a history of how Google came to be (Pagerank). Showing a slide of the prototype. They couldn’t afford real legos, so they used generic legos to build a case. However, the cheap imposters fell apart one night.

“Britney Spears” was one of the first reasons they moved beyond search. They noticed tons of mispellings and realized they had the the sheer quantity of information to mine for correct spelling and to offer them when someone searches for the wrong spelling.

How then can we make it better? A Google product timeline. They also acquired products like Blogger that help people create content. Of course everything is paid for by their advertising model.

Slide: “Tech Revolution: from mainframes to the web” – big servers, many clients. In other words, the web as platform.

Their goals:

1. Organize all of the worlds information
2. Make it accessible
3. Make it useful

But how?

• Is it practical to scan all of the books ever published. Used a metronome to time how long it takes to scan a book. At 45 minutes a book, they decided it was practical and set forth with Google Book Search.
• The idea is to search the full text of every book and recieve appropriate snippits.
• But many books are still under copyright. Partner with publishers for current print (5%), out of copyright (20%), the other 75% are out of print and in wierd copyright limbo. This is what libraries help with, but it is hard to find them. Thus, they only show snippets.
• Google Scholar: Anurag’s undergraduate thesis. Within 48 hours of publishing, someone told him he made a mistake on page 2 that had been disproven a few years prior. He then vowed to make it possible for people to find those important citations like the one he missed.

• Find a paper
• Shows found cited by
• (missed it)
• Appropriate books
• If they don’t have the item indexed, they at least show the citation if they have it.
• Points out OpenURLlink resolver integration with scholar.

• “Mobile is ubiquitous” – they envision searches to be primarily on cell phones or their descendants.

• He points out what mobile services they already offer, but admits that it is still a very clunky experience.
• Seeing and hearing what we want when we want it. Example used was video iPod.
• Support of one laptop per child program

• “Google Co-op” – how to collect human expertise to help with domain specialties. Didn’t get all of what he was saying.

• Health is one of the first topics they tackled. More health searches than anything else.
• This empowers both consumers and physicians to make better decisions.
• They were told early on by a user”I just wanted to let you know that Google may well have saved my life…” He was having chest pains and googled heart attack to find out symptoms. He was soon calling 911.

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