The Inside Google Book Search blog has announced that it is closing down its Google Catalog Search Product. If you have never heard about it, don’t worry, it was never really meant to become a popular product. Its real use was to help Google conquer the world.

The Pandia Post presented Google Catalogs in December 2001:

“Google is beta testing a search engine for searching the content of more than 600 catalogs from American mail order retailers. Google scans printed copies of the catalogs and automatically converts the text portion to a format that can be searched. Google then uses the same algorithms that power Web search engines to enable search the catalog content and ensure that the most relevant catalog pages are presented first in your results. ”

Innovation frenzy

We readily admit that we did not get the point at the time. Admittedly, Google were able to scan the catalogs for free. No sales company in the world would say no to that kind of publicity.

Still, we found it hard to believe that people would prefer this kind of catalog search to a much more advanced shopping search engine.

As a matter of fact, many observers have taken this Google innovation — as well as many others — as a sign of Google not being able to focus its activities on its core competence: search. Indeed, Google’s innovation practices may seem a little bit spastic at times.

Making all printed info searchable to all

With hindsight, however, Google Catalogs makes perfect sense.

Google used the scanning of sales catalogs to learn the art of scanning and text recognition, developing a technology that made it possible to scan a large number of publication in a short time. They even built their own scanners.

As early as in 2001 Google was working on the idea to scan all printed material in the world and make it searchable in Google.

Even today many find this idea preposterous. We don’t. It is in fact a brilliant idea that may make Google the default search destination not only for web content, but also for books, magazines and other types of printed information.

Google Books is one of the products Google was aiming for with Google Catalogs.

Google Translate: Make all info available in all languages

This is not the only technological development that demonstrates Google’s ability to develop long term plans.

Many believe Google Translate is Google’s attempt at competing with the AltaVista/Yahoo! Babelfish online translator. In other words: It is a destination where you can ask Google to translate some text or a web page for you.

It is that as well, of course, but when Google has spent so much money on statistical machine translation (i.e. a system whereby artificial intelligence software “learns” languages by comparing paired document — in this case multilingual documents from the United Nations) it is because it ultimately wants to make all information available in as many languages as possible.

In other words: The goal is to let an Arab speaker that searches the Web from — let’s say Amman — get web pages translated from English in his or her regular Arabic search engine results if Google cannot find relevant information in Arabic.

Google Translate is still not good enough to make this kind of translations ubiquitous, but Google is slowly getting there.

Farewell, Google Catalog Search (Inside Google Book Search Jan 14 2009)