| time to shift to all those very nice vertical search
| engines, including our own AZ-IN, next version due
| in March.
Google's divine mission powered by profit
By Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
Google and the Myth
of Universal Knowledge
By Jean-Noël Jeanneney
Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
University of Chicago. 92 pp. $18
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, would
like to share his digitized dream.
Make that a nightmare.
....
Jeanneney's concerns are simply business. Nothing personal, jingoistic
or anti-American, he explains. Happily, they're also straightforwardly
ideological: Capitalism shouldn't run culture, and government should
intervene in the market because, as de Gaulle once observed, it "creates
injustices, establishes monopolies, [and] favors cheaters."
And so we get a take on world Googlization you're not likely to get from
your broker.
Jeanneney woke up to Google's impact on his terrain in late 2004, when
company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that the king of
search engines had signed an agreement with several American
universities to digitize approximately 15 million volumes. The focus
would be works not protected by copyright, offered to the public for free.
cont'd....
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/special_packages/sunday_review/16046691.htm