Catching up after a long Thanksgiving holiday...

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is adding yet another logical component to its online arsenal:

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

The Mountain View, Calif., company plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee, say the people familiar with the matter. Planned pricing isn't known.

I currently use Google's web page creation service, Google Pages, for temporarily storing documents I collect on the web while performing research, thus allowing me to work from different computers on the same task. The new file storage service will streamline that process significantly.

Google is hardly the only option for online storage. The WSJ article includes a graph listing other options, including web products from Microsoft and AOL.

[WSJ.com] Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data

Google has finally introduced it's online slide presentation application to compete with Microsoft's PowerPoint:

Starting today, presentations -- whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor -- are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it's time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they're watching.

[Official Google Blog] Our feature presentation

The New York Times reports today that both Google and Amazon are expanding their forays into the electronic book world, Google by offering paid full access to scanned copyrighted material and Amazon by introducing a wireless eBook reading device:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.[...]

Also this fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database, according to people with knowledge of its plans. Publishers will set the prices for their own books and share the revenue with Google. So far, Google has made only limited excerpts of copyrighted books available to its users.

Following a failed history in the late 90s, eBooks appear to be on the verge of a comeback following the introduction last year of Sony's Reader product. Unlike the Kindle, however, the Reader does not have wireless functionality and must be connected to a computer to download new content.

[NY Times] Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books

Various blogs (notably TechCrunch) are reporting that the introduction of a wiki service from Google is imminent. The tech giant acquired online wiki company JotSpot a year ago, but has not allowed new registrations for the service since the deal. Recently, however, the discussion boards and help desk for JotSpot moved to Google, and at least one access point for the service now provides an error screen featuring a "Google Wiki" logo. This would appear to bring to fruition Google's longstanding promise to bring JotSpot under the Google Apps umbrella.

[TechCrunch] Google Wiki Prepares to Launch

Google announced the Google Custom Search Engine on Monday. The tool allows Google users to create and publish search engines to search specific pages or sites. A bookmarklet enables one to quickly add a web page or site to the custom search engine they have created. Creating a search engine involves visiting the Google site and setting a few parameters.

Getting started is the easy part. The opportunity to make full use of the Custom Search Engine tool will take considerably longer. The documents are pretty complete and show how to use several impressive features including context and annotations. Search engine creators can also create custom pages that are included in the creator's website. A simple custom search engine for the community of law library and technology related sites is here.

B1: "Give Me One Box to Access Our Electronic Resources": The Pioneering Google Search Appliance Beta Test

Kathleen D. Fletcher (Moderator), Franklin Pierce Law Center
Roberta Woods, Franklin Pierce Law Center
Tracy L. Thompson, New England Law Library Consortium
Jerry Dupont, Law Library Microform Consortium

Kathleen D. Fletcher

At Franklin Pierce Law Center (FPLC), the library's ILS vendor offered a product that, the salespeople claimed, provided simultaneous, combined searching of all the library's electronic resources (i.e., federated searching). Upon closer inspection, however, it became obvious that the product wouldn't work as advertised. The librarians then began searching to find tool that really would provide that capability. Ultimately, they rejected all the products on the market that offered federated searching because none of them really worked in a law library environment. Instead, FPLC began working with Google to create product that would do what they needed.

Roberta Woods

In 2004, the library at FPLC surveyed its students and discovered that hardly anyone made use of the library's licensed databases or the OPAC. Instead, students relied primarily on Westlaw and Lexis. The librarians decided that they needed a federated search tool so that people would start using all of those neglected resources. Their specific desire was for a "one box" solution that returns fast results with no duplicates returned in a nanosecond -- just like Google.

Salespeople for all of the federated search tools on the market always tended to use small database samples during their sale demonstrations, which didn't really reflect the typical use such a tool would get in a law library environment. Furthermore, the salespeople always seemed to talk as searches ran -- probably to distract customers from noticing just how long the searches took. Some even bragged about embedded Google searching within their products, yet the results of those embedded searches mysteriously differed significantly from REAL Google search results.

In practice, federated searching simply takes far longer than most patrons are willing to wait. The order of search results is problematic (e.g., first in-first out rather than relevance) and contains too many duplicates. Statistics packages are costly add-ons, and the statistics produced by those add-ons are meaningless because they only reflect searches performed, not actual document retrievals.

Federated searching tools are difficult to implement, require significant investment of human resources and time, and take years to completely implement. The vendors for the products were not responsive, and search results cannot seem to be duplicated from one search to another. Worse still, the average search on these tools takes a whopping 35 seconds to finish.

Even if these problems could be fixed, there was another huge issue looming for law library implementation of federated search tools: the only legal database included for use in most of the tools is LegalTrac.

FPLC decided to look beyond library technologies. The librarians soon discovered the Google Search Appliance (GSA). Upon this find, they called in the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO) because Google was probably unlikely to partner with a small independent law school on a pilot project.

GSA indexes static content locally, which allows fast results. The appliance includes all of the usual Google search functionality, yet libraries can control the look and feel of the user interface. GSA also allows the creation of persistent URLs for its search results and provides the capability to create discrete custom collections within a larger collection of documents.

Licensing quickly became an issue. It took several months for Google to produce a workable licensing agreement, and even then it was only a 30 day license, much to short a period to fully evaluate the product.

Installation of GSA, however, was easy. The installation of the plug and play server took virtually no time. After that, the first web crawl was started and the library quickly had searchable content. The default multithreaded crawls (crawls using many spiders or bots instead of one) of licensed content created problems for some of the third-party content providers' servers, but it is easy to throttle it back to a single thread. For static content, one crawl is sufficient because the content doesn't have to be re-indexed.

Ultimately FPLC decided that the only workable licensing model would be one involving a consortium like NELLCO because the price for the GSA is simply too high. Every two years, it costs $24,000 for a collection of just 500,000 documents and $480,000 for 15 million documents.

Oddly enough, Google recently offered FPLC and NELLCO a free alternative -- that would have to reside entirely on Google's servers. This, of course, would give Google control over everything. The librarians are somewhat suspicious of Google's motives for offering this free, controlled option.

Tracy Thompson

NELLCO has long standing relationship with FPLC. The consortium was already considering federated searching when FPLC called. The NELLCO board enthusiastically approved the project and facilitated meetings with Google and content vendors to start the test implementation.

Google's inability to clearly define what exactly a document is (the basis for its pricing scheme) was problematic.

NELLCO devised what it called "The Mothership Model." NELLCO would host a central search appliance that would index all available content. Then, each individual library would use the mothership appliance, with content customized based on a library's licenses.

The Mothership Model minimizes the impact on vendors' servers because there is only one spidering instead of one for each library. In addition, all libraries involved would share costs, so no one institution is hit with the huge price tag alone.

Following the conclusion of the pilot project, Google has been reluctant to work on the solution any further. NELLCO is currently looking at other options and alternatives, including Google's free offer.

Jerry Dupont

To make indexing by Google possible, the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) gave NELLCO access to its metadata, not its actual documents. This was more than enough to make the solution workable, so LLMC had no problem allowing access for project. Google has since contacted LLMC directly offering to index its data, and they want access to actual records, not just metadata. LLMC is still analyzing the situation to see if this is a viable option.