Google Data

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Last year a computer programmer named Luca Mori stumbled upon ancient ruins in the town of Sorbolo, Italy. These ruins lay buried for centuries until a Google Earth satellite photo revealed mysterious rectangular shadows in the landscape -- shadows that Mori, an archeology enthusiast, was able to identify as a Roman villa. The villa was there all along -- but it took the right person with the right search tool to find it.

Why are we telling you this story on a blog about Google Book Search? Because this project was born out of the passion for discovery. There's an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, history and culture contained in the world's books. We're inspired by the idea that with every book we index, we're building a better tool for people to find books and make these discoveries. Some will be personal, like when a reader from South Carolina found a book containing a photo of his great uncle, delighting his housebound father. Others will be more...er, esoteric, like when a blogger decided to use Book Search to find references to the phrase, "Snakes on a Plane." And others, like Luca Mori's, will unexpectedly expand the frontiers of human knowledge.

On that note, we're excited to announce Inside Google Book Search, the official Google Book Search blog. This blog is about discovery -- yours and ours. Here you'll find members of our team sharing thoughts, tips and the occasional announcement about Book Search. We intend for this to be a place not only for Book Search enthusiasts, but also book lovers of every stripe. We'll be highlighting cool books we've found, discoveries you've made, big thoughts about the future of book search and more. We hope you tune in often and tell us what you think.