Google Book Ngram is a visualization tool that you can use to search at most five-word phrases in books printed in the last five centuries in several languages. You can use it to explore how various words were used in the history, how their meaning changed, when they started to be used and when they started to disappear from a language. It also possible to find out how books described various historical events, in which countries they were mentioned a lot and where only a little. This all can be deciphered form a simple graph. Thanks to a link to Google Books you can also view respective parts of the books.

This article describes a specific usage of search engines: measuring semantic distance between words and puts the topic into the broader context of collective intelligence. As a demonstration, a dedicated web application, Mechanical Cinderella, has been created.

The article deals with the changing role of libraries in the future. Their situation may appear precarious – while during the Communist rule politically forbidden books, detective stories or fairy-tales were stolen in the Czech National Library (to be read), after the year 1989, in the new economically effective age, the greatest damages were caused by professional thieves who stole rare books and prints in order to sell them. If libraries are to be successful in the future, they should collaborate with the websites like Wikipedia and be more interactive. After all, today, visitors of book fairs are able to print and bind a book, or visit a workshop on creative writing, so maybe in libraries of the future it will be possible for every reader to become a writer, too. As M. Kundera says, everybody will then be a writer and there will be no readers left (with the exception of librarians who would have to catalogue the books). The article also deals with libraries as community centers, e-books in libraries and with sci-fi visions of electronic chips in human brain and possible consequences this may have for libraries.

The article briefly introduces Google Latitude, a new Google service that enables users to share their location with their friends. A particular example is used to illustrate the functionality of this new service in practice.

Knol – A Unit of Knowledge is a new service provided by Google. Although it resembles Wikipedia in some ways, Knol is not edited by anonymous users and so it may prove to be more reliable. Now it contains approx. 350 articles.

This article is focused on Google Translate and its usage options.