Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
Since I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any problem with it. Maybe it's not as dead as this person thinks.
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
> surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions.
But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
I guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However, browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
https://about.google/company-info/
Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
> The largest truly open library in human history
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
"Hey, remove search?"
"OK, it was costing money anyways."
"But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any books with previews, which are disproportionately modern books." <emphasis mine>
Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.
Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English, which would have been an act to make information open and accessible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.
Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions.
But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.