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The story behind Google Books: Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria (2017)
- kumarharsh 6y ago"It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. 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."
- foolzcrow 6y agoGoogle should rename itself 1984. The digital censorship is for our good didnt you hear!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kuharich 6y agoPrior comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14172791