I know it exists, but it has appeared to languish for years. They rely on third parties now for inclusion of books, whereas in the early days they innovated on their own with specialized scanning technology. They seemed quite proud of it a decade ago. When was the last time Google has touted their books project? Have they even integrated searching books into their main search (which was supposed to catalogue And make searchable all the world’s information)?
It was paralyzed by legal disputes with book publishers.
In the years the lawsuits were going on, nearly everyone left the project. And then the lawyers have put in so many red lines that it's nearly impossible to make any changes to it.
Yup, I read about that on Wikipedia, but I can't help but not care. If a company touts massive initiatives and then gets bogged down in lawsuits, it seems like they didn't do the basic due diligence to avoid that. (Uber, AirBNB, and others seem to also have these headwinds, though not to the extent that it led to permanent paralysis, so maybe Google made a bet they thought they'd win and then didn't, whereas these other companies did.). I can't help but wonder why, with Google's resources vs. Uber or AirBNB, they couldn't keep moving forward if they wanted to. Strike deals, pay people, whatever. If it matters (i.e. if it involved ads) they would have done it.
Given Google's behaviour since the end of their period of true innovative excellence, I don't cut them much slack.
This well-written article, "Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria"[0], might change your mind on that. I found it to be a compelling and tragic story.
Edit: actually, I think this would make a good submission. Looks like it hasn't been posted since 2017.
> People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.
Could have been great but it wasn't perfect for everyone so it was scraped because surely Congress would take up this noble quest...
It hasn’t been killed but it is clearly a zombie.