Happy Birthday Google!

When I went to Google home page to do some searching to find some facts for my next blog post, I was surprised to see the Google logo. It's Google's Birthday!!! Then I did some searches & got these old Google Birthday logos.

Google derives from Googol which means 1.0 × 10¹⁰⁰. It's founders are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. You can read about all the Google milestones here.

I wonder how much we use Google services daily. If Google weren't here, I wonder how different a world we would be in. My list of Favorite Google services are as follows:

Gmail Read more about it here	Google Search	Blogger
Google Toolbar	Google News	Picasa
Book Search Read more about it here	Google Image search	Orkut
Google Page Creator	Google Groups	Google Spreadsheets
Google Calendar	Google Desktop	Google Analytics
Google Maps	Google Language Tools	Google Labs
Google Earth	Google Notebook	Google News Archive Search

For a more complete list of Google Services please visit Wikipedia

Happy 8^th Birthday, Google!

Freedom to Read...

I was searching for Robert Knox's 'An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon' when I stumbled upon this two great free resources. I was amazed to see how much free content they had & we are so ignorant as not to use them.

Project Gutenberg

This was started by Michael Hart in 1971 & named the project after Joannes Gutenberg who innovated the printing press.
By August 2006 there are 19000 free ebooks in Project Gutenberg.
Material is added only after it has received a copyright clearance according to US copyright law.

Google Book Search

Google offers full view of books that are out of copyright. (Also google continues to offer those books that are still in copyright, which can be searched for keywords & will be presented with a small snippet of the surrounding text to the relevant keyword & there will be links to stores where you can buy the book)
They simply provide full text view of books according to the copyright law of the viewers country. There is a link where PDF formats of the relevant ebook can be downloaded if they are out of copyright.
Also from yesterday (August 12) they are offering 42 Banned Books

Also see a List of digital library projects