[grattperret]

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!

[ENCOSEARRALIA]

1,930,000 pages with my last name.

[9enackivegliva]

93 books with Ming is a bastard

far less if you search "Ming is a bastard"

the word IS getting out

[ErubTiereedig]

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

[Grennios]

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.

[OmqMZtkv]

888 pages on Giannopoulos

476 pages on MarkG

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

[tarmpriopay]

Apolyton is but a footnote to CivFan

[NeroASERCH]

14,600 pages on Siddiqui

[WapSaibian]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
14,600 pages on Siddiqui Now 20,300!

[Cogebrego]

Originally posted by DanS
Whoa! I just did a search and now the earliest book in Google with my last name in it was published in 1665.

Journal des savants ... By Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Francia), Institut de France

Damn, this is the coolest thing in the world. 1651 here Roughly the same thing, though, De bello civili Cæsaris et pompeii

[Bbjhjxfy]

Originally posted by snoopy369

1651 here Roughly the same thing, though, De bello civili Cæsaris et pompeii 1012 for me. Benedetto Croce: Logica come scienza del concetto puro. 5940000 hits for me, though.

[Anydayhybeall]

62 with my last name, but several of the results on the first page reference my mom or my dad

[pennadyFeet]

931.

There is something wrong about their search algorithm though. You get no results when searching for "book" or "books".

[Srewxardsasv]

Originally posted by OzzyKP


Link me! I know a guy who was scanning books for Google.

Incidentally, how much do they get paid? I thought it was slightly higher than working for Kinkos, but not much.

[RicardoHun]

First result on my surname was "The History of Natural Hygiene and Principles of Natural Hygiene".

[corriffuniee]

689 hits on my surname. Mostly botanical references...


Well, I kinda like to vegetate.

[Sliliashdes]

Kinda hard to combine a page-turning machine with a scanner.

[pMJWFoAWD]

Lots of mechanical parts. You have to lift the book, use an appendage delicate enough to flip one page, and then lower the book again.

This will be slower than having a human do that and will require a lot of maintenance, not to mention initial R&D. Minimum wage workers are faster and cheaper.

[babopeddy]

The problem is getting the robot to reliably flip one page at a time (sometimes problematic for Human hands) without tearing any pages (again, Human hands sometimes mess up). I'd sooner trust a person over a robot with a book. There are robotics being developed that are touch sensitive, but that's just it: They're being developed; they aren't available yet, certainly not for Google to utilize in this project.

[SannyGlow]

An update... In about a half year, Google Books appears to have about tripled its stacks. At the end of August '06, 198 books were available for full download including my last name. Now, there are 642.

Probably a lot more to come, given the deal with the Bavarian State Library...

Google Books has a new cool feature. It gives a map, with pins at all of the locations mentioned in the book.

Google Book Search wins backing of German library

Reuters
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; 12:42 PM

BERLIN (Reuters) - The Bavarian State Library, one of the biggest libraries in the German-speaking world, has agreed to participate in Google Inc.'s project to scan books from the world's great collections.

The Munich-based library, which contains around nine million volumes in total, is to make about one million books available to the Google Book Search, ranging from classics by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm.

A spokesman for the library said a large share of the books due to be scanned were German, although the sample also includes many in Italian, French, Spanish, Latin and English.

Stefan Keuchel, a spokesman for Google Germany, said on Wednesday some books will be available for download once they go online, adding that this should occur "in the next few years."

"This is a very important step for us, particularly in view of the criticism that's been leveled at the project," he said.

"And it's pleasing not just for us, but also for Google users, particularly in the German-speaking world, because the deal means that we'll be able to significantly raise the number of German books in the Google Book Search," Keuchel added.

All the items to be included are works for which the copyright has expired. In Germany, the law currently protects books for 70 years after the author's death.

Other participants in Google's project include the Complutense University of Madrid, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the National Library of Catalonia, a number of U.S. universities and the New York Public Library.

Google is also cooperating with almost 20 local publishing houses for the newly launched Chinese version of its book search service, books.google.cn, spokeswoman Jin Cui said.

The drive to digitize major libraries was nearly derailed when authors' and publishers' groups sued Google in 2005 to block scanning of copyrighted library books, arguing that the effort might tempt consumers to stop buying printed works.

Google argues that it is creating the electronic equivalent of a library card catalog for copyrighted works and that the library project only plans to publish the full texts of out-of-copyright books in the public domain.

Among the prominent critics of the Google Book Search has been Microsoft Corp.

(Additional reporting by Sophie Taylor in Shanghai)