The Google EPIC
Goog God!
While Microsoft is working feverishly to reposition themselves against the threat of Google, the rest of us have to wonder...what's next? Is nothing safe from Google? Are we all going to be subsumed? Are we all just so much 'content' to feed the insatiable 'indexing engine' of the Goog God? And what will Google do when it is done?
Movie portrays growing Google as the death knell for Fourth Estate
As Google positions itself to be a total online content provider, the question of what is next for the search engine giant might be at least partially forecasted by U.S. journalists Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan.
Matt Thompson, deputy editor for online content for startribune.com, the Web site for the newspaper in Minneapolis, and Robin Sloan, who works for Current, a San Francisco-based cable and satellite TV network, created "EPIC 2015." In the short movie, the two peg the growing Google as the death knell for the slumbering Fourth Estate, which loses its gatekeeping and publishing role to the Internet.
The eight-minute piece -- produced by the Museum for Media History, a fictitious construct of Thompson and Sloan -- swerves between the plausible and the dramatic, tendering a prophecy that is both alarmist and maybe inevitable.
Short movie envisions the growing Google 'EPIC'
See the EPIC 2015 movie at:
Search on every word in every book, in every library on earth...in a second!
Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Google's job is to help people find information. Google Print's job is to make it easier for people to find books. When you do a Google search, your results now include pointers to those books whose contents, stored in the Google Print index, contain your search terms. For many books, these results will, like an ordinary card catalog, contain basic bibliographic information and, at most, a few lines of text where your search terms appear.
Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third, en toute langue -- and all, of course, entirely for free. How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? How many out-of-print and backlist titles will find new and renewed sales life? How many future authors will make a living through their words solely because the Internet has made it so much easier for a scattered audience to find them? This egalitarianism of information dispersal is precisely what the Web is best at; precisely what leads to powerful new business models for the creative community; precisely what copyright law is ultimately intended to support; and, together with our partners, precisely what we hope, and expect, to accomplish with Google Print.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Google Print
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