©ollectanea

Check out the NYT Technology article about PARC's startup whose goals are to go head to head with Google: In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google - New York Times. The idea of a "conversation" with a search engine is quite appealing, to say the least, but what interested me even more about this article is the idea that there will be something better than Google. One of the concerns I hear most often about the Google Book Search project, aside from the copyright issues, is that a company's ownership and control over the accumulated knowledge represented by 30 million books is unprecedented and frankly, quite scary. But Google lives in a world where control slips through one's fingers, inevitably. More, better pushes hard on all those who would preserve their status as best. Trying to predict where anything this dependent on technology might go is impossible. So, we voice our concerns, we question, we push for improvement in projects like Book Search, and we keep looking for new opportunities to accomplish our objectives. Collectively, we all keep going...