Larry Page set out to make the world's books searchable

Person: Larry Page
Lived: b. 1973
Field: Web search
From: American

The story

Larry Page, born in Michigan in 1973 to a mother who is Jewish, co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. Long before Google existed, books were at the heart of his thinking. In 1996, as graduate students at Stanford, Page and Brin worked on a research project supported by the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, whose goal was to make digital libraries work.

Page imagined a web crawler that would index the content of books and map the connections between them, judging a book's relevance by the number and quality of citations it received from other books. That idea, applied to links between web pages rather than citations between books, became the crawler called BackRub and inspired PageRank. The founders also held on to the original dream: a world in which people everywhere could search all of the world's books.

In 2002 Google began the book project under the codename Project Ocean. The first experiments were slow: Page and his colleague Marissa Mayer needed about 40 minutes to digitise a 300-page book. Speeds soon improved to thousands of pages per hour. In 2004 Google launched its programme for publishers, and in December that year announced the Library Project, scanning books from partner libraries including the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the New York Public Library. Many more libraries joined later.

Authors and publishers raised copyright concerns, and the Authors Guild sued in 2005. Federal courts ruled in 2013 and 2015 that Google's scanning was fair use, and in 2016 the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Public domain books can be read and downloaded in full, for free.

Google reports that Google Books has made more than 40 million books discoverable, in more than 400 languages. Researchers can search the full text of millions of volumes to find a passage in seconds, and the Ngram Viewer, launched in 2010, lets historians and linguists trace how words and ideas have risen and fallen over centuries. Scholars warn that some catalogue details contain errors, so findings should be checked against the originals.

For a student far from a great library, a researcher tracing a forgotten text, or a curious reader, Page's dream has turned shelves once open to a few into a resource anyone can search.

Why it matters

Google Books lets anyone search the text of millions of books and read public domain works free online, opening great libraries to people far from them.

About Larry Page

Co-founder of Google whose PageRank idea made the web searchable, putting the world’s information within reach of anyone with a connection, free of charge.

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Larry Page

b. 1973 · Web search

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