Google Catalogs: No Updates For Months
Google Catalogs, their mail-order catalog scanning service, hasn’t been updated in almost five months. Is Google abandoning the service? Brad Hill writes:
Now I see that most catalogs are sadly out of date, with nothing later than Holiday 2004, and very few even that recent. I haven’t yet found out whether the problem is lack of scanning effort on Google’s part, or whether catalog companies have stopped sending the books. I suspect the former, because participating mail-order companies probably established ongoing subscriptions to Google, and it would take an unusual effort to stop the flow. I image piles of catalogs in some Googleplex office, awaiting the scanner.Perhaps it’s no surprise that the service is being neglected (if that is the case). Gooigle Catalogs was always an unusually retro service, blending old media and new media. But that didn’t make it any less cool, or less useful.
Who can blame them? Who uses catalogs anymore anyway? Besides, I think its far more useful to spend your scanner time on classic books.
I’ve personally always been a fan of catalogs myself, but I guess the problem is most major catalog companies have their products available on their website too. I bet they could save google a lot of time and just send them a PDF of the catalog.
Comment by Nicholas | March 22, 2005