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  • From: "Giorgos Cheliotis" <giorgos AT smu.edu.sg>
  • To: <commons-research AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Commons-research] Table comparing Yahoo and Google's commons-basedadvanced search options
  • Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 13:04:31 +0800

Ben, great post, I’d like to see more research-oriented posts on this list, which has so far been mostly dedicated to the planning of the isummit workshop. A quick comment: I would be careful with generalizing when what you have is limited  examples of specific pages in Australia. Your approach I believe has some merit and we do want to know what different CC search /backlink search methods can capture, but again, as I said, one should be careful about making general statements like “ Yahoo ignores the majority of CC licenses”. The statement may be correct after all, and I have made some similar arguments in the past, though using a different logic, but is the fact that some AU pages do not show up sufficient proof of this? It would be interesting to hear Mike’s perspective on this as well.

 

Giorgos

 

From: commons-research-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:commons-research-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Ben Bildstein
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 12:15 PM
To: Commons-research
Subject: [Commons-research] Table comparing Yahoo and Google's commons-basedadvanced search options

 

Hi commons researchers,

I just did this analysis of Google's and Yahoo's capacities for search for commons (mostly Creative Commons because that's in their advanced search interfaces), and thought I'd share. Basically it's an update of my research from Finding and Quantifying Australia's Online Commons. I hope it's all pretty self-explanatory. Please ask questions. And of course point out flaws in my methods or examples.

Also, I just have to emphasise the "No" in Yahoo's column in row 1: yes, I am in fact saying that the only jurisdiction of licences that Yahoo recognises is the US/unported licences, and that they are in fact ignoring the vast majority of Creative Commons licences. (That leads on to a whole other conversation about quantification, but I'll leave that for now.)

(I've formatted this table in Courier New so it should come out well-aligned, but who knows).

Feature                       | Google | Yahoo |
------------------------------+--------+-------+
1. Multiple CC jurisdictions  | Yes    | No    | (e.g. http://parsa.anu.edu.au/node/33)
2. 'link:' query element      | No     | Yes   | (e.g. search for 'Wikipedia link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page')
3. RDF-based CC search        | Yes    | No    | (e.g. http://www.lightningfield.com/)
4. meta name="dc:rights" *    | Yes    | ? **  | (e.g. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/conrad/joseph/)
5. link-based CC search       | No     | Yes   | (e.g. http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Frog)
6. Media-specific search      | No     | No    | (http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search, http://images.search.yahoo.com/images/advanced)
7. Shows licence elements     | No     | No    | (i.e. doesn't show which result uses which licence)
8. CC public domain stamp *** | Yes    | Yes   | (e.g. http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Clinton_lies_again_2)
9. CC-(L)GPL stamp            | No     | No    | (e.g. http://www.phylodiversity.net/phylocom/)


* I can't rule out Google's result here actually being from <a rel="license"> in the links to the license (as described here: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license).
** I don't know of any pages that have <meta name="dc:rights"> metadata (or <a rel="licence"> metadata?) but don't have links to licences.
*** Insofar as the appropriate metadata is present.

Notes about example pages (from rows 1, 3-5, 8-9):

  • To determine whether a search engine can find a given page, first look at the page and find enough snippets of content that you can create a query that definitely returns that page, and test that query to make sure the search engine can find it (e.g. '"clinton lies again" digg' for row 8). Then do the same search as an advanced search with Creative Commons search turned on and see if the result is still found.
  • The example pages should all be specific with respect to the feature they exemplify. E.g. the Phylocom example from row 9 has all the right links, logos and metadata for the CC-GPL, and particularly does not have any other Creative Commons licence present, and does not show up in search results.



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