Google Books is Awesome!

[DanS]

Today, I took a look at how far Google is in its book scanning project, and it's apparent that they are making progress. There are about 7,800 book pages mentioning my last name versus 1.4 million web pages. Try it out for yourself.

They are starting to offer full PDF downloads of books in the public domain. I downloaded a couple today to test it out (based on the query of my last name), and they appear to be from Stanford's library. 198 books available for full download including my last name. One book from 1841 published in London. One pamphlet from 1862 in German. Another book from 1880 in German.

There was some wild stuff published, and let's just say that not all was of earth-shattering quality. 3

http://books.google.com/

[DanS]

So far, the oldest book mentioning my last name was published in 1802.

A Collection of State Papers Relative to the War Against France Now Carrying on by Great Britain. (Excerpting the Times of London mentioning one Captain S of the Imperial Royal Troops.)

Far out!

[SlowwHand]

Pretty cool. Something I want to check out.

[Dinner]

1,930,000 pages with my last name.

[asleepathewheel]

255,000 full books with my last name


such is life with a generic last name.

(smith gets you 894,000)

[Japher]

93 books with Ming is a bastard

far less if you search "Ming is a bastard"

the word IS getting out

[VetLegion]

I'm browsing a book about steam engine from 185x and someone has gone through the trouble of erasing the parts of pages which show steam engine patents

[VetLegion]

I see fingers on some pages

And another funny thing, the fingers are usually masked by a grey block pasted over them, you can see it in the lower right pages of the books (at least those I'm browsing through).

However, it is probably masked by a computer algorithm, which sometimes misses.

So we have some pages with human fingers on them scanned

[Kassiopeia]

3150 hits for my surname. Ha!

[realpolitic]

It's a 30:1 ratio for me, I thought it would be a lower ratio; I share the same last name (but am unrealted to) with a mathemetician who is well-known by people in the field, so nerds like us who spend who would rather buy books than sports cars are more likely to know about him.

[Sava]

66600 pages on sava

[MarkG]

888 pages on Giannopoulos

476 pages on MarkG

3 pages on Apolyton!!!

http://books.google.com/books?q=Apolyton&btnG=Search+Books&as_brr=0

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by MarkG
888 pages on Giannopoulos

476 pages on MarkG

3 pages on Apolyton!!!
http://books.google.com/books?q=Apol...Books&as_brr=0

Ah! We finally find the meaning of apolyton

I suppose going from "ultimate" to "pieces of loose coinage" isn't all bad...

[Kassiopeia]

Apolyton is but a footnote to CivFan

[MikeH]

184 books with my surname, 140,000 web pages.