Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has slowly been shifting its priorities with regards to archival projects as the company believes it has outgrown its 14-year-old mission statement of being the custodian of the past. CEO, Larry Page, has already admitted that the company’s ambitions have grown as focus shifts to the present and future.
Social and mobile efforts, as well as experiments with robotics and artificial intelligence, are a clear indication that the company remains focused on the future.
Archival Projects
The giant search company first made an attempt at the archival business with the acquisition of Deja archives in 2001. In 2004 the company made known its intention of creating archives of books online with the Google Books project that saw it scan a number of books in partnership with libraries. Google New Archive came into play in 2006 allowing the company to publish news as old as 200 years.
Since 2010 Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) seems to have gone slow on most of this projects with most of them being in a limbo or abandoned entirely. The company’s focus has shifted to the digital world of mobile. Google Books has been dead for some time with no updates on the platform. Google News Archive is now directing searchers to Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL)’s search platform. Google Books has on the other hand faced legal battles something that has only gone to affect the scanning of books.
Internet Archive Picking Over
Google has already removed the timeline view on its search page a feature that allowed users to search results by date with new search ranking algorithm shunning old pages at the expense of new material. The turn of events is a clear indication that organizing world’s information is not always a profitable endeavor a lesson that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) seems to have learned thus shifting priorities from the same.
The Internet Archive is on the other hand slowly picking up from where Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) left and is now believed to be indexing over 435 billion worth of web pages going back to nearly 20 years. The nonprofit platform now hosts over 6 million public domain books, 1.9 million videos as well as over 6,000 ephemeral films and 2.3 million audio recordings among many more.
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