The Internet search company Google plans to put millions oflibrary books online and make them searchable.

This week, Google announced a project with the New York PublicLibrary and the libraries of four universities. These are Stanford,Harvard and the University of Michigan in the United States andOxford in England.

Stanford University and theUniversity of Michigan have agreed to let Google copy their fullcollections. Michigan put some of its seven million books on the Webthis week. Its full collection is about six years away.

The New York Public Library says it will only provide Google withmaterials no longer under copyright restrictions. Oxford will offeronly books published before the twentieth century. And HarvardUniversity will provide just forty thousand books at first.

The project could take ten years or more. Some librarians sayeach book might cost about ten dollars to reproduce in digital form.Workers use scanner machines to take pictures of each page. Googlesays its users will see links in their search results page whenthere are books that relate to their search.

For years libraries have been making electronic copies,especially of old and rare documents. But the process has often beenslow. There are also legal issues.

Google says it will show only a small part of library booksprotected by copyright. Users might see only pages that contain thewords they searched for. The project will expand the Google Printprogram. This lets publishers make books and other informationsearchable online. Amazon-dot-com has a competing program.

Google earns almost all its money through sales of advertising.Users see links to products and services next to their searchresults. People can click on these links to buy things or get moreinformation.

This week, Google won a ruling in a legal case brought by one ofits advertisers, Geico, an automobile insurance company. Geico isnot happy that links to competitors also appear when people searchfor information about the company. Geico called this an illegal useof its name. But a judge disagreed.

Google is the most popular Internet search engine. The programcurrently searches more than eight thousand million Web pages. It isoften praised for its ease of use and for finding the informationthat people want, generally in less than a second. Google faces itsstrongest competition from Yahoo and M.S.N., the Microsoft Network.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford graduate students, beganGoogle in nineteen ninety-eight. The company sold its first sharesof ownership to the public this year.

Google says its library project will increase interest in books.It may also get more people into libraries to see the real thing.The American Library Association says visits are up one hundredpercent since the Internet began to get popular ten years ago.

In the News, in VOA Special English, was written by Cynthia Kirk.I'm Steve Ember.