Google launched a Shakespeare portal. Searchable full-text of the entirety of the Bard’s work (or, perhaps, Sir Bacon’s? whatever!), along with Shakespeare “related” content from Google’s various other portals. In that sense it’s a demo for how Google’s algorithmic approach to content can be leveraged to create an automatic portal on any topic – in addition to the books themselves, there’s tie-in content via Google video, Google Earth, Image search, News, etc.
I guess I am insatiable with my expectations, but while the portal thing is cool and all, I’d much rather see something simple like googling directly for “Hamlet Act 1 Scene 4” to give me the full text on the right sidebar (much like googling for “13 yen to dollars” or “45 horsepower to watts” gets you immediate results, no clicking required). Add the Bible and the Qur’an on there too, while you’re at it.
10 otakupoints to whoever catches the pun in the title.
No idea – or rather, too many implausible ideas. The best of them is probably A Bard Shar’d, but now I’m curious.
I don’t know how things are for the Qur’an, but the Bible has a seemingly endless number of translations, and most translations have their adherants and (of course) opponents.
Some Baptists will use ONLY the King James version, (which is about as readable as Shakespeare to the untrained) and some even go so far as to say all others are the work of the devil. The Catholics have thier own, which contains entire books not found in the protestant variants. Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own as well. Then there are numerous flavors with varying tradeoffs between accuracy and readability.
I’d enjoy a Bible search engine as well, although it would take a miracle to pull it off without enraging or offending SOMEONE.
I’m sure that was probably more than you wanted to know.
Oh yeah.. the bard thing. Erm. I got nothin’.
Shamus – it’s worse for the Qur’an 🙂 I’d be happy with a setup akin to what they have at al-islam.org, where you ge the arabic original followed by the Pickthal and Yusufali translations. For the Bible, I assume that the King James would be sufficient for 99% of use (far fewer people are engaged in life-or-death exegesis with the Bible nowadays than with the Qur’an).
HC – impressive 🙂 But not quite. Here’s a hint.
(OK I guess it wasn’t exactly a pun.. more like a clever allusion. At least I thought it was clever. Marvin will likely disagree.)
I don’t think it was clever. There’s only one person as clever as me within 40 parsecs of here, and that’s me.
Is it something to do with Uru? That’s the only thing which ‘shard’ reminds me of.