Look out Merriam-Webster, there’s a new competitor in town: Google. A new image-based dictionary bearing Google’s name is a bit different and operates on the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words, replacing every definition with the first image that showed up in a Google Images search for that name.
Actually, Google didn’t produce this alphabetical image dictionary. Two artists from London, Ben West and Felix Heyes, are the actual brains behind the 1,240 page book containing 21,000 visual definitions.
How is such a book delivered?
“We used two PHP scripts my brother Sam wrote for us,” Ben West told CreativeApplications.Net. “The first one takes a text list of dictionary words and downloads each image in sequence, and the second lays them out into columns and outputs a PDF.”
The PDF was then printed into a beautiful book – handbound, thumb indexed pages held together in a marbled paper hardcover, the golden Google logo clearly indifferent to whatever Internet horrors it may contain.
There is also the why of it all. Why did they decide to make such a reference book, aside from the possibility that the Internet might go off?
Ben links their decision to society and how we think and process things. He addresses the true fact that we have short attention span. He also noted the influence of media fatigue and how we no longer go to the reference books for information.
Google with their massive servers and large images portfolio is starting to become and online pictionary. Ben laid out the sadest truth when he said, “It’s really an unfiltered, uncritical record of the state of human culture in 2012,” concludes Ben.
So, how are we faring? “I would estimate about half of the book is revolting medical photos, porn, racism or bad cartoons.”
As for the book itself, it could also be worth a thousand or more lawsuits, depending on who holds the copyrights to the various images within the book. If you would like a copy of the book you can visit Ben’s site to pick up a copy and see more of his work.
What do you think of this dictionary? Would you like this being the new norm for a dictionary?
Related reading
Google Walkout: What the ‘five real changes’ demanded by staff will entail for the search giant
Earlier today thousands of Google employees across the world walked out of their offices in protest against sexual harassment and discrimination. We take a closer look at what the ‘five real changes’ demanded by staff will entail for the search giant.
10 fun facts (and a typo) from the original Google paper by Larry and Sergey
Fun fact #1: "Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?" - people encountering a crawler for the first time. This and other quality snippets pulled from the original paper presenting Google in 1997.
Google’s PageRank algorithm, explained
In their original paper presenting Google, Larry and Sergey define PageRank like this: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)). We dive into what that really means.
Yandex: Beating Google in Europe’s biggest internet market
Yandex has reasserted its dominance over Google in the Russian market. It has a presence in other countries too and is branching out into numerous other tech verticals. A look at search in Russia and what Yandex is doing well to solidify its position.
