2006-09-27

Happy Birthday Google!

Google 8th Birthday Logo

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 7th BirthdayGoogle 6th BirthdayGoogle 5th BirthdayGoogle 4th Birthday.gif

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 logo

Gmail

Read more about it here

Google logo

Google Search

Blogger Logo

Blogger

GoogleToolbar logo

Google Toolbar

Google News logo

Google News

Picasa logo

Picasa

Google Book Search logo

Book Search
Read more about it here

Google Image Search logo

Google Image search

Orkut logo

Orkut

GooglePages logo

Google Page Creator

Google Groups logo

Google Groups

Google Spreadsheets Logo

Google Spreadsheets

Google Calendar Logo

Google Calendar

Google Desktop Logo

Google Desktop

Geogle Analytics Logo

Google Analytics


Google Maps Logo

Google Maps


Google Language Tools

Google Labs

Google Labs

Google Earth Logo

Google Earth

Google Notebook Logo

Google Notebook

Google news Logo

Google News Archive Search


For a more complete list of Google Services please visit Wikipedia

Happy 8th Birthday, Google!

2006-09-14

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



Google Book Search








Also see a List of digital library projects