Yahoo! trying to catch up

Google has been working on the idea of Online library for over a year now and now Yahoo! is trying to catch up. Guess, they have realized that this idea is a hot cake, so today Yahoo! came up with plans to build a vast online library of books and multimedia files.

Check out this piece of news:

INTERNET group Yahoo! today outlined plans to build a vast online library of books and multimedia files that will address publishers' copyright concerns.

The Open Content Alliance, a project that the search engine is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors.

Other participants in the alliance include software firm Adobe Systems, PC maker Hewlett-Packard, the Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media, the University of California and the University of Toronto. The potentially vast library would be searchable and freely available to anyone, whether individual web surfers or commercial sites.

Although Yahoo! will power the search engine located at www.opencontentalliance.org, all the content will be made available so it can be indexed by all the other major search engines, including that of rival Google. By joining the project, Yahoo! is hoping to upstage Google, which has a one-year head start on scanning and indexing books so more literature and academic research can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

David Mandelbrot, Yahoo!'s vice president of search content, said: "We are building a collaborative effort that will make a great deal of copyrighted material available in a way that's acceptable to the creators. That is novel."

Guess in this fight of supremacy between Yahoo and Google, we users will probably emerge as winners because of free access to loads of materials.