Google Book Search Offers More

Harrods has a reputation for excellence with stores that are more than shopping destinations, more than just splendid buildings. Harrods has remained London's premier retail outlet for over 155 years, yet the fundamental ethic of selling quality merchandise and giving customers exemplary service has never been questioned or compromised.

For the last decade Christmas starts early at Harrods: the Christmas World has been present from August for many years now and Harrods is saying that the foreign tourists are the main reason.

Peter Willasey, Harrods' corporate communications director explains that: "There are cynics out there who say it is too early. If the whole store was decked out then yes, it would be too early, but that won't be until the beginning of November. Just this one small area will be up and running before then." Plus it seams that the demand from customers is very high and Harrods come to meet this demand as there are only 139 shopping days from the Christmas World launching to the real Christmas on December 25.

Harrods opened its 'Christmas World' of 15,000 sq ft with a Father Christmas clad in a red safari suit, accompanied by a zebra and with Bing Crosby's 'Let It Snow' played in the background of the department store's Christmas area. The combination was very appropriate considering the hot weather. Tinsel, Christmas trees, cards were not missing and the Harrods Christmas World was dazzled by a sleighload of the very finest Christmas decorations and gifts for all festive fancies. The Christmas cornucopia was crammed with everything from bears to baubles, so whatever the customers festive needs are, they're sure to be met among the items crammed into the festive area on Harrods' second floor. The priced for your festive needs vary from £329 to just 75p for a single bauble. The store plans to sell luxury crackers priced at £1,000 for a box of eight and even a £15,000 Christmas gift voucher for the person who has everything.

Virginia Hayward supplies a selection of christmas hampers and christmas gifts.


Major universities such as Oxford University, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, as well as the New York Public Library are working with Google on a project called Google on the Books Library. The aim of the project is to put books online in a searchable format.

Google's book search service is almost as old as Google itself. In 1996, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were graduate computer science students working on a research project supported by the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project. Their goal was to make digital libraries work, and their big idea was as follows: in a future world in which vast collections of books are digitized, people would use a "web crawler" to index the books' content and analyze the connections between them, determining any given book's relevance and usefulness by tracking the number and quality of citations from other books.

There's been a lot of discussion and debate about this project and about other projects that wanted to digitize the world's books in order to make them easier for people to find and buy. Such projects are: the Library of Congress's American Memory project, Project Gutenberg, the Million Book Project and the Universal Library where have for some years copied out-of-copyright books as text files, which can then be used for printing, reading or piping into a programme for editing. What Google came to offer now is books in a "print-ready" format which is a step forward from the digitalized books only to be read on-screen.

Google's book searching device only access books that are no longer under copyright. For the books that are still under copyright Google Book Search offers only bibliographies along with limited extracts.

Google is trying to offer a wider spectrum of services planning to target the software market for companies. Google intends to offer companies the chance to run their email, calendar and other services on their own domains, to expand on the service it offers to individuals. If until now Google was focused on searching and advertising, it will come now in direct competition with software giant Microsoft.