The Mother of all Libraries

Once upon a time, long, long ago there lived a man called Abdul Kassem Ismael. As the Grand Vizier of Persia and a renowned statesman and soldier, Ismael was perpetually on the move. Since Ismael loved reading, he always travelled with 400 blinking, odorous camels who carried his 1,17,000 volume library wherever he went. Hard to believe this, but a book in this vast mobile library could be located almost instantly. Simply because Ismael’s hirsute humps were trained to walk in alphabetical order…

Thousands of moons later, humankind has invented little silicon humps called computers. And the Internet. And there are scores of libraries on the Internet today. And they fetch what you want in a trice—without the assistance of odorous, alphabetically-arranged, plodding quadrupeds and blinking gaze. Of the nearly two billion odd websites, microsites and hyperlinks that currently make up the DNA of our cyberspace, perhaps one of the most amazing of repositories is a site called the Internet Archive at www.archive.org. It is quite the mother of all libraries.

The Internet Archive was born in ’96 as a non-profit Internet library, with the purpose of providing researchers, historians, and scholars, access to historical collections in digital format. Since then the library has grown to become large multimedia archive. It includes moving images (movies, TV shows, video, animations), books, audio recordings (including recordings of live concerts from bands that allow it), "snapshots of the World Wide Web" (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software.

The idea behind the Archive is to try and change the content of the Internet from “ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives”, protect our “right to know”, and help us exercise our "right to remember". In a nutshell, it is an endeavour to preserve "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. The Archive collaborates with institutions like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian in this effort.

Battleship Potemkin, Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness, Computer Chronicles, Net Café... Yeah, classic public domain feature films, war films, westerns, cartoons, open source movies, advertising, educational, industrial, amateur and home movie collections, popular television programmes... There's a whole load of stuff out there for those who have the patience to dig and download. All legal and licenced. But free. (Gaming freaks, jump to www.archive.org/details/gamevideos straight away and download a feast of game videos.)

The audio section holds Live Music Archive (30,000 downloads of high quality live concerts in a lossless format), Netlabels (8,000 complete, freely downloadable/streamable, mostly Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of 'virtual record labels'), Open Source Audio and hazzar other crazy and not-so-crazy stuff.

The text section has thousands and thousands of free books for download, everything from the Canadian Libraries to the Million Book Project to Open Source Books to Project Gutenberg to Children's Library and the classic Arpanet. There’s loads of software in the Software section too. But no space to talk about here now. So just zip in and take a look…

If you've been following my weekly meanderings here, you would recall my writing about Web 2.0, the next level of web applications. Well, here are three more exciting Ajax-based samples: Writely, a web-based word-processor (www.writely.com); NumSum, a web-based spreadsheet (http://numsum.com); and Voo2do, a site that "offers advanced task and priority management for busy, ambitious individuals" (http://voo2do.com). These are full-blown applications, fully functional and totally free. But hey, mind what you feed your spreadsheet here as it offers no privacy from prying eyes (human, not camel)…

Absolute Googlisation

The Googlisation of our lives on the Internet is absolute. So pervasive is this search engine that most people associate searching the Net solely with Google. Yet, many a time we snort at it for making us wade through a morass of inane and irrelevant information. However, frequently the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the search engine, but our search queries. For the true olfactory prowess and abilities of Google go way beyond its basic aptitude of being a good “nosed” Tommy kutta. Here’s a fundamental primer on how to harness the amazing talents this power house.

Apart from simple search terms that all of us fire at a search engine, Google also supports several weapons to help you sharpen your hunt. “Advanced operators” as these tools are termed, adapt the search to improve it, or tell Google to re-work the search completely.

Commonly known operators include: OR (to include either of two search terms), "" (the quote operator, for the exact phrase), - (the minus operator, to exclude something), and + (the plus operator, to include something). If you are newbie and want info on these, go to Google’s Basics of Search page (www.google.com/help/basics.html). Here, however, let’s look at some special operators that Google supports.

link: This lists web pages with links to the specified web page. For example, [link:www.hindustantimes.com] and will list pages that have links pointing to the hindustantimes.com homepage. (Remember, no space between “link:” and the URL; and skip the brackets.)

related: This lists web pages that are “similar” or “like” the specified web page. For example, [related:www.ndtv.com] throws up other news broadcasting/publishing web pages.

info: A query [info:] will gives you primary information that Google has about the site. For example, [info:www.ftv.com] will show: “International TV channel dedicated to fashion, broadcasts 24 hours a day on satellites and cable systems. Site features programs and lots of info on fashion...”

define: Need an quickie explanation of a term? Using [define:] on Google will give you a definition of the expression you enter after the colon from several online sources. For instance, [define:nanotechnology] presents a page-full of explanations for “nanotechnology” from various websites.

stocks: A query [stocks:], will link to a page that shows stock information for the mentioned stock ticker symbols. So typing [stocks:intc] will give you information about Intel’s stocks. Remember, you need to type the ticker symbol, not the company’s name.

site: This limits searches to one website. For instance, [admission site:www.stanford.edu] will only search Stanford University’s site for admission info.

#…#: This numrange search restricts a hunt to within a range of numbers. For instance, a query like [DVD player Rs.2000..3500] will only show DVD players between Rs.2000 and Rs.3500)

safesearch: Obvious, isn’t this! Yes, it excludes adult-content. So [safesearch:sex education] will get you material on sex education without any embarrassing adult sites.

filetype: If you are looking for results within a specific file type (PDF, for example), just type [filetype:pdf dictionary] in Google’s search box and see the results.

Two for the Road
Calculator: Google also has built-in calculator function. The calculator resolve math problems involving basic arithmetic, more complicated math, units of measure and conversions, and physical constants. Just type the calculation you want to make in the regular Google search field: Be it “56+98*346” or “2^20” or “sqrt(-4)” or “half a cup in teaspoons”, and just punch Enter…

Currency Convertor: Next time you do some currency conversion, try Google. Type what you want converted into Google’s search box and hit "Enter". And you can be pretty vague too. “3.5 USD in INR” will of course get you the correct result. But something as ambiguous as “currency of Brazil in Malaysian money” or

“15 British pounds in South Korean money” will also produce the answer.

Greedy for more Googling? Go to www.google.com/help/features.html for yet more facets.