Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 8

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I'm sure you've all seen Google Earth although probably when you pulled in up you would prefer to see Australia and not North and South America. This is an overhead shot of an area where I live in Northern Virginia called Tysons Corner and I put this up just to illustrate the ability to aggregate information from a wide range of sources and then allow users to see that information and evaluated it themselves. When you turn on the Google Earth community button lots and lots of buildings are now labelled with what's going on in the building restaurants, banking services, hotels and so on.

All of that information is accumulated by the users of Google Earth, not by Google itself and it's a very good example of the way in which people are willing to contribute information into this common environment and it has systematized our ability to share human information so that's a very exciting outcome and one which I expect will continue to repeat itself over and over again.

Another area that Google has great interest is to unlock our ability to search information which is not in an electronic form or at least was not in electronic form. Books are a very good example, they are a wonderful medium they last for a very long time but it’s really hard to search through physical books. When I stand in the middle of my personal library trying to remember which book has a particular piece of information in it I despair of finding it by leafing it through all the books until I find it what I really want is the ability to use computer cycles to search through all of that and in order for that to happen I had to have the index of all of the books online. I don’t need the contents of the books to be available to me online I just need to know what's in the book. An so Google's proposition is to scan the books capture the content index the content and make the index available with small little snippets around whatever words or sentences may have be discovered.

Some people have distorted this argument into Google wanting to put up all of the books online and make them completely accessible and that is not what we're trying to do we just want to make them discoverable; so that after you discover a particular book has content that you're interested in you'd have to go and get that book somehow while if it's available online that’s fine otherwise you might go to the library, or Amazon or to nearest bookstore or borrow from a friend. But the Google book search is intended to help make the print world a part of our online world and to take advantage of applying computer cycles to discover things.

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