Search Me?

Google staffers working on the Book Search project include, from left, Jim Gerber, Alexander Macgillivray, Susan Wojcicki and Adam Smith. Wojcicki, in whose garage the company started, says digitizing all the world's books has been the goal of the company's founders for years. (By Randi Lynn Beach For The Washington Post)

Product manager Adam Smith explains how these deals work. With the publisher's permission, Google scans the full texts and makes the books searchable by key word. Users can't download a whole book, Smith says, but they can see sample pages -- "publishers can set a dial in terms of how much" -- and Google offers links to sites where the books can be purchased.

"The partner program is really an online marketing tool to help publishers," says content partnerships director Jim Gerber, who works with Smith and Wojcicki. Most major houses have signed on.

So far, so good.

But as Googlers will tell you, over and over, the goal of Google Book Search -- the current name for the overall scanning program -- is "to create a comprehensive, full-text searchable database of all the world's books."

Not some. All.

"We're Google. We like doing things at scale," as Wojcicki puts it.

Problem was, fewer than 5 percent of "all the world's books" were in print and available from Google's publishing partners.

So where were the rest of them going to come from?

'The Final Encyclopedia'

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Sometime in 2002, Stanford's head librarian, Michael Keller, got an invitation to an exclusive gathering that would change his professional life.

The host was Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. The location was Allen's place in the San Juan Islands, near Seattle, where a dozen or so high-level information technologists convened with an agenda that grew out of Allen's fascination with a science fiction novel called "The Final Encyclopedia."

"You know that novel? Gordon Dickson?" Keller asks. "It informed Paul's thinking. His question was: Are we near the point where we can have every piece of information, every fact, every record of every opinion and attitude, every bit of criticism, all the history of all the world's decisions and so forth . . . in one giant database?"

Google's Page had been invited to the San Juans, too. He and Keller talked. In September 2003, Keller and Herkovic drove down to Mountain View to hear a proposition from Page and some other Googlers.