From Times Higher Education (London)
Major errors prompt questions over Google Book Search's scholarly volume
By Matthew Reisz
It should be the world's greatest scholarly resource, but some claim that Google Book Search's many huge - and often hilarious - errors raise major questions about its value to serious researchers.
Why does a link to a book on cosmology by a Napoleonic mathematician lead to a novel by Barbara Taylor Bradford? Could Sigmund Freud really be one of the authors of The Mosaic Navigator: The essential guide to the Internet Interface? And how did Barack Obama publish 29 books before he was born? ...
Such grotesque mistakes were pointed out by the linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, adjunct full professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information, at its recent conference, "The Google Book Settlement and the Future of Information Access"....
Professor Nunberg was even more outspoken in a blog posted on 29 August. With Google likely to become "the universal library for a long time to come", scholars need good metadata. Unfortunately, Google's information is "a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess"....