Google

Libraries Do Well In Local Google Zeitgeist 2009

They say all politics is local. Search can be local, too: An Angeleno is less likely to search for information about the T than a Bostonian. For some local flavor, Google found these popular searches unique to specific U.S. cities. Library related searches show up on 12 cities.

Google Restricts Free Reading on Pay News Sites

Amid criticism from media companies that it is unfairly profiting from news content, Google is closing a loophole that allowed some motivated newshounds to read large numbers of articles on subscription-based sites without paying for them.

The company’s “First Click Free” program, which publishers of pay sites can choose to participate in, is designed to allow readers to get a taste of a site’s content. For example, a person who finds a Wall Street Journal article through Google News can read it free, but if they try to reach other articles from that page they are asked to buy a subscription.

Full story here.

Topic: 

Rolling Back The Clock

Rolling Back The Clock
By Stephen Michael Kellat, Erie Looking Productions
1 December 2009

As a podcast presenter, I do listen to other programs out there. While the astute observer would note that LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast leans right, my own listening does not lean always that way. One program originating from public service television TVO in the Canadian province of Ontario is called Search Engine.

This program is unique as it started out as a radio program with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, became a podcast hosted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and now is a podcast hosted by TVO. In many respects Search Engine is a program fairly similar to LISTen but originates from Canada and lacks the focus on library and information science applied issues LISTen has. The program's most recent episode is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.5 Canada license which would make it appropriate to be burnt to audio compact disc for distribution to library patrons as previously discussed on LISTen in a sort of variation on slot radio.

It being Tuesday, Search Engine host Jesse Brown released another episode. This episode discussed the recent remarks by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Although Murdoch was incorrectly identified as a citizen of Australia, which has not been the case for decades. Murdoch was bound by law to hold United States citizenship alone if he wanted to own television stations there. The Adelaide native recently presented what seemed like startling ideas. Murdoch is against cost-free content online and wants to challenge the validity of the fair use doctrine in court. Murdoch also indicated he felt that his lawyers would persevere.

Throughout the course of the episode, Brown puzzled through the matter with a guest as to what it might mean for the Internet. To a student of librarianship, this is not as troubling as it might have seemed to Brown and his guest. Indeed, Rupert Murdoch was not proposing anything new for the knowledge ecology. What Murdoch instead proposed was essentially the turning back of the clock to a time when search engines like Google and Yahoo did not exist and you had to search first with Lexis-Nexis and/or the venerable DIALOG where your access times were metered and next to nothing was free in the databases there.

Lexis-Nexis is not gone as a search tool for news stories let alone legal information. DIALOG still exists and still has quite active databases like World News Connection, produced by the CIA's Open Source Center that derives intelligence from openly published rather than covert sources, that are the public releases of data that already inform leaders like President Obama. The paradigm that Murdoch seeks is to impose the ways of DIALOG and Lexis-Nexis on the rest of the Internet. Even there, this more harkens back to the early days of information services like Prodigy and America Online/AOL than to today's Internet.

What does this mean for the future of the knowledge ecology? Unfortunately it means little until actual action is taken. Until then the order of the day is speculation.

Creative Commons License
Rolling Back The Clock by Stephen Michael Kellat is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at erielookingproductions.info.

Taxonomy upgrade extras: 

Did Google Get A Shot Across Its Bow?

Over in the blogs at ZDNet, Tom Foremski raises an interesting point. While conventional thinking would paint as folly the statements by News Corp about pulling out of the Google search infrastructure, Google may lose far more than News Corp might in the matter.

Amended Google Book Settlement Filed: Links to Court Filings, Early Press Coverage and Analysis, etc.

The Amended Google Book Settlement Agreement was filed Friday. Links to the text and other related court filings, plus early press coverage, a summary of changes and FAQ, press releases issued by parties involved the lawsuit and sources for a legal analysis of the amended agreement are provided on Law Librarian Blog at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2009/11/amended-google-book-settlement-f...

Topic: 

Google Book Search Revised Settlement (2.0) Released; What About Libraries?

The Resourceshelf is going to be on the lookout for news, commentary from experts, and viewpoints from various organizations and companies involved in the GBS story. They’re posting selected snippets with links to the full text. They also know that in the document filed with the court, there is one mention of libraries, public libraries to be specific.

Topic: 

What Are We Searching For? Google Suggests

Google Suggest Reveals What We're Searching For
The answers to today's crossword, Jewish baseball players, testicular comfort, and the right way to pronounce "Reuters." Google is collecting and storing what we write. Once you start looking for them, unexpected suggestions start popping up everywhere.
See Also:
Awkward Suggestions and Contrasts in How Google Suggests Searches

The Relationship Between Public Libraries and Google: Too Much Information

Article in First Monday

Abstract:

This article explores the implications of a shift from public to private provision of information through focusing on the relationship between Google and public libraries. This relationship has sparked controversy, with concerns expressed about the integrity of search results, the Google Book project, and Google the company. In this paper, these concerns are treated as symptoms of a deeper divide, the fundamentally different conceptions of information that underpin the stated aim of Google and libraries to provide access to information. The paper concludes with some principles necessary for the survival of public libraries and their contribution to a robust democracy in a rapidly expanding Googleverse.

Full article here.

The Global Antitrust Battle Over Google's Library

The case presents a tangle of issues: how to create new markets for old books without shortchanging authors; how to nurture new technology without stifling competition; and how to preserve all that when one company — in this case, Google — is pioneering the revolution and could profit handsomely. One commentator, who supports the original settlement, has called it "the World Series of antitrust."

Pages

Subscribe to Google
http://lisnews.org/topic/google?page=14
lisnews.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-14
43633
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:26U4XKT44MIMITVZQALEEUFN5BK74S3U
<urn:uuid:7a954357-1e95-4d51-ab0f-d1e985117c1a>
2015-03-29T00:08:45Z
104.27.171.130
sha1:7CKYR42QV74O4J3NT2IO5JLFHLMZT5AQ
<urn:uuid:33290d84-680c-42a3-9660-786108089e41>
http://lisnews.org/topic/google?page=14
length
response
<urn:uuid:89b4a950-495e-437a-9b24-64823cf093be>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-14
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf