Stewing over exactly how Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” speech continueth? Fear not, for Google hath come up with a William Shakespeare site where you can search the celebrated writer’s plays to your heart’s content.Tying in with the 50th anniversary of New York’s popular outdoor Shakespeare in the Park festival, Google launched its “Summer with Shakespeare” website Wednesday.While searching within a play will find the correct quote, reading the bard’s collected works through Google can be an interesting experience.From a quick perusal of some of the comedies and tragedies, the plays that have been scanned in full tend to be older published versions of the works—one was dated 1886—and a few of the illustrations to the plays also featured shots of the scanner’s pink fingertips. Other websites already offer access to Shakespeare’s complete works, including the MIT Shakespeare Homepage and the University of Victoria’s Internet Shakespeare Editions. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology site doesn’t currently provide search capabilities, and the Canadian university uses Google’s search engine.Google’s Shakespeare site uses the search company’s controversial Google Book Search, previously known as Google Print. The company’s ambitious plan to scan all the world’s books and put them online in searchable form has met with much disapproval from authors and publishers around the world. Google intends to digitize all the books held by its library partners whether in the public domain or in copyright. Authors or publishers who don’t want their books scanned have to opt out of the program, an action that has generated much bad feeling. Some writers and publishers believe that Google should have to ask their permission to digitize their works, not the other way around.Jen Grant, a member of the Google Book Search team, noted in a company blog that some print versions of Shakespeare’s plays may not be in the public domain everywhere in the world.“Where copyright status is in question, we protect the publisher by showing the Snippet View,” Grant wrote. Instead of showing the complete text relating to a search of a book’s content, the Snippet View instead provides some information about a work including a few excerpted sentences, much like a card-catalog listing.Oh, for the record, after asking his question, Hamlet goes on to wonder “whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)Related Links: The Enterprise Gets Googled Google’s U.S. Government Search Site Launched Google to Purchase Its HQ for $319MCheck out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe