Google Launches New Initiatives: Blog Search and Google Print

Google has launched a new specialty search engine that will enable Internet users to sift through millions of personal journals that are posted online as web logs or "blogs". Google's Blog Search focuses exclusively on material contained in the journals and will allow for searches in a number of languages other than English, including French, Italian, German and Korean. Google is not the first to launch such a search engine and Google, Yahoo and MSN have already been indexing blogs in their general search engines. This new initiative, however, is expected to allow for more thorough searches of updated blog information and, given Google's broad reach, to provide blogging with a larger and broader audience. In related news, Google's book-scanning program, Google Print, is set to resume this fall. This initiative, in which Google will attempt to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet, will test existing copyright laws that were written before digital age. Google announced the library digitization project last December, in partnership with the New York Public Library and the libraries at the universities of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan and Oxford. Although supporters of the project claim that it will help to make literature more accessible, increasing exposure and book sales, The Authors' Guild Inc, a New York-based non-profit organization representing more than 8000 authors, has filed a lawsuit in the US accusing Google of "massive copyright infringement" and claiming that the search engine, without permission, cannot put books in the public domain for commercial use. Google has responded by stating that it respects US copyright laws and the fair use doctrine. It points to the fact that authors and publishers can choose to have their material excluded from the program. The online users of books covered by copyright will be limited to accessing bibliographic information and only a few sentences of text and readers will be directed to booksellers and libraries for further information. For a news story relating to Blog Search, see: http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y27724FDB To access Google's new blog search engine: http://blogsearch.google.com To access Google's search engine: http://print.google.com/ For The Author's Guild press release on the lawsuit: http://www.authorsguild.org/news/sues_google_citing.htm For related news stories, see: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/09/19/google.copyright.ap/ http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q18721FDB http://makeashorterlink.com/?L1A764FDB Summary by: Clare McCurley