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.
|