discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

Hi, all.

So, for some reason, Google's CC search won't find Wikitravel content.
We get crawled by Google several times a day, and a search on "normal"
Google turns up wikitravel.org as the first hit for "wikitravel":

       http://www.google.com/search?q=wikitravel

...whereas filtering for CC content turns up none:

       
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikitravel&as_rights=(cc_publicdomain|cc_attribute|cc_sharealike|cc_noncommercial|cc_nonderived)

Now, I've always resisted the RDF-in-a-comment method of including CC
metadata, which, y'know, BARF.  But I've tried adding it to Wikitravel
pages in hopes that Google will learn about our license. But
apparently with no results.

I'll note another couple of things: Wikipedia content doesn't seem to
turn up in Google's search, either. (I wrote the code for CC metadata
for both WP and WT -- before Google started doing CC searches.) And
Yahoo! returns both Wikipedia and Wikitravel for CC-only searches.

Anyone know what Google looks at to determine the
"creative-commonsness" of a page?

~Evan