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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

I assume Google abandoned this along with all their earlier mission statements in favour of building another chat app.

I can't imagine a life at google. So much promise, all turned to ash.

More like an ad company driven by dark patterns that needs to pretend being good and nice and innovative as otherwise it will lose goodwill just like Facebook did.

I think the Google founders were inherently nicer people than the Facebook founder, but their companies ended up converging on advertising because that's really the only way their products could be profitable.

Is that really the only way to be profitable though?

I believe going public inevitably leads to needing to follow growth, which then eventually corrupts virtuous missions.

Supposedly all at Library of Congress (LoC) anyone have experience using it there?

Could you take a moment to check it Google Books search still exists?

I'll give you a hint: https://books.google.com/?hl=en

> Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

I know it exists, but it has appeared to languish for years. They rely on third parties now for inclusion of books, whereas in the early days they innovated on their own with specialized scanning technology. They seemed quite proud of it a decade ago. When was the last time Google has touted their books project? Have they even integrated searching books into their main search (which was supposed to catalogue And make searchable all the world’s information)?

It hasn’t been killed but it is clearly a zombie.

It was paralyzed by legal disputes with book publishers.

In the years the lawsuits were going on, nearly everyone left the project. And then the lawyers have put in so many red lines that it's nearly impossible to make any changes to it.

Yup, I read about that on Wikipedia, but I can't help but not care. If a company touts massive initiatives and then gets bogged down in lawsuits, it seems like they didn't do the basic due diligence to avoid that. (Uber, AirBNB, and others seem to also have these headwinds, though not to the extent that it led to permanent paralysis, so maybe Google made a bet they thought they'd win and then didn't, whereas these other companies did.). I can't help but wonder why, with Google's resources vs. Uber or AirBNB, they couldn't keep moving forward if they wanted to. Strike deals, pay people, whatever. If it matters (i.e. if it involved ads) they would have done it.

Given Google's behaviour since the end of their period of true innovative excellence, I don't cut them much slack.

This well-written article, "Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria"[0], might change your mind on that. I found it to be a compelling and tragic story.

Edit: actually, I think this would make a good submission. Looks like it hasn't been posted since 2017.

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

This was a great read and indeed quite tragic

> People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.

Could have been great but it wasn't perfect for everyone so it was scraped because surely Congress would take up this noble quest...

> I'll give you a hint: https://books.google.com/?hl=en

>> Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

I mean, the domain resolves, but that doesn't mean the product exists. You can run searches, but you're not allowed to see the results.

Why aren't you allowed to see the results?

I search, see the results, and then click on a result to view the applicable contents of a particular book. In the contents that get displayed, the search term I had entered is highlighted.

In some books it'll only show snippets, where

a) sometimes the snippet returned doesn't even contain the search term

b) you'll only get the snippets for the first three results, and that's that.

There might be even cases where the book is indexed, but the publisher has disabled even snippets, but I'm not sure about that. But a very limited snippets-only search instead of a full preview is certainly a thing.

> Could you take a moment to check it Google Books search still exists?

If only it still worked well enough to use. I use to use it every day, but how the mighty have fallen.

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