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Handwritten Historical Manuscripts Searchable on Google Search Engine Soon

February 13, 2006

The latest feather in the cap of Google Search Engine is that now the historical manuscripts which are handwritten can soon be searched on the search engine just like the other searchable items in the web. The credit for this should be given to all those tireless workers who converted the hand written manuscripts in their digital form.

A new research project funded by Google and executed by three Universities is underway and very soon many historical handwritten manuscripts could be made available for the public to search through a considerably lesser effort.

The project, announced by Dublin City University (DCU) on Thursday, all started on a whim. DCU professor Alan Smeaton has been working on technology that can recognize objects that appear in videos. His technology can detect an object, like a car or an airplane, in the frame of a video, then extract the image to compare it to a database of images to identify it or enable it to be searched. On a whim the same technology was applied by them to the handwritten documents of George Washington. Luckily these documents were already digitally transcribed.

Some people who were working with Google were contacted and were told about the video matching technology, mentioning the George Washington manuscript trial. "They were interested so we did some more experiments and showed them the results and they decided to fund a project," he said.

The goal of the project is to demonstrate that the technique is workable and scalable, Smeaton said. If so, Google can decide to employ the technology. The researchers are not locked into making the technology only available to Google, however, Smeaton said. They plan to publish their findings as scientific research.

Source: InfoWorld