Month: June 2008

Google’s Virtual Bookshelf Plans?

Some surprising news came out a few weeks ago that Microsoft was canceling their book scanning and search program.

Google’s book search continues on, and provides an opportunity to find digital copies of books online.

You can also create a library of books of your own choosing at Google, with some aspects of a virtual bookshelf built into the presentation of those books. There are a number of virtual bookshelf sites online, many with social networking features added to them, that do. I recently explored a few of them, and here are some of the ones that I came across:

A patent application for a virtual bookshelf program from Google was published last month, and it provides us with a chance to see how Google might integrate its book search, and Google Books Library Project with a personal library feature that allows us to show the books that we’ve read, share reviews with others, and track and find books that we might want to read in the future.

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How Search Engines Can Index Pages in Parts

Web pages can contain a lot of information about various types of objects such as products, people, papers, organizations, and so on. Information about those objects may be spread out on different pages, at different sites.

For example, a page may host a product review of a particular model of camera, and another page may present an ad offering to sell that model of camera at a certain price.

One page might display a journal article, and another page could be the homepage for the author of that article.

Someone searching for information about the camera, or about the author may need information contained in both pages. They may have to use a search engine to locate multiple pages, to find the information that they need.

If there were a way for a search engine to automatically identify when information on different web pages relates to the same object, that might be helpful to searchers in a number of ways.

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Google on Archiving and Retrieving Documents Using Your Camera Phone

You’ve returned to your hotel room from a business meeting with a pocket full of business cards from people that you’ve met, and receipts from your business trip. One at a time, you place the cards and receipts on a desk in your room and snap pictures of them with the phone on your camera, and send the photos off to Google to be processed.

The cards and receipts are scanned, and organized for you in your documents archive, so that they can be searched for, and used in your contacts list, and in your expense report.

That example brushes the surface of possibilities of a document archiving, storage, and retrieval system of images of physical documents, described in a new patent application published by Google.

Other documents that could be used in this type of system might include doctors prescriptions, tickets, contracts, and more. Depending upon how the system is set up, just taking a picture might trigger the document archiving system.

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