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