Rupert Murdoch Admits Defeat: Now Wants London Times To Appear In Search Results

Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well: 

On Techdirt.

Not So Fast, FAST

FAST - "Federation Against Software Theft" - is manifestly one of the more risible copyright organisations, since it doesn't even know the law (it's not "theft", it's "copyright infringement" - quite different, because nothing is stolen in these cases.)

Since that is what they are paid to do, its PR company keeps sending me FAST's press releases, which I studiously ignore since they are uniformly ridiculous. But its latest missive is so indicative of what the problem is with the copyright industries, I feel obliged to share part of it (sadly, it's not yet online - I'll add it if and when it appears.)

It's about Newzbin 2, which it inaccurately claims

aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums.

Of course, there's no aggregation whatsoever, just links: Newzbin 2 is a search engine, like Google. Clearly FAST has the same problems understanding that distinction as it does with the difference between theft and copyright infringement.

But the best bit comes towards the end:

Our stance has always been one of carrot and stick – ensuring that customers are educated on the economic impact of piracy as well as advocating compliance with the law protecting creators.

Except, of course, there is no carrot there, just propaganda and threats. And the propaganda is wrong: as I - and others - have noted, there's growing evidence to show that piracy actually boosts sales.

This neatly sums up the problem with the copyright maximalists. Rather than focussing on giving customers what they want - easy access to digital products at reasonable prices - they spend all their time focussing on the stick. Little wonder, then, that the current "victory" in the courts will prove as hollow as all the others, because there is still no "carrot" being offered as an alternative...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, Google+

Please Help Fight EU Search Engine Surveillance

Just the other day I wrote about the foolishness that was the Gallo Report – which, alas, seems to have gone through with all its excesses. And as if that weren't enough, here's yet another problem that we need to address:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wolfram Alpha Does Not Understand Copyright

Remember Wolfram Alpha? That super-duper search engine - sorry, "computational knowledge engine" - that was going to change the way we looked for and found information, and also cure the common cold (OK, I made that last one up)? Seems to have disappeared without trace, no? I'm not surprised, if it misunderstands copyright as badly as this post suggests:

Try cutting and pasting from the results page. You can't, and with good reason. According to Wolfram Alpha's terms of use, its knowledge engine is "an authoritative source of information," because "in many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it." Therefore, "failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram Alpha is not only a violation of [its license terms], but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law."

Copyright, as Wolfram seems not to understand, is a bargain between creators and their public. As an *incentive* to create, the former are given a time-limited monopoly by governments. Note that it is *not* a reward for having created: it is an incentive to create again.

Now consider Wolfram Alpha. This is essentially a computational process - remember, it's a "computational knowledge engine". So, it is simply a bunch of algorithms acting on data. Algorithms don't need incentives to create: outputting is what they do if they're useful. So copyright is completely inappropriate, just as it would be for the output of any other program processing information on its own (obviously, if that information is words fed in by a human, copyright would exist in those words because they were created by someone).

Wolfram's ridiculous claim to copyright in its results does have the virtue of providing a nice illustration of the real limits of this intellectual monopoly. For the rest, it might try finding out a bit more about copyright so that it can amend its licence accordingly - I suggest using a good search engine like Google.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.

Google Is Evil in a Flash

On Open Enterprise blog.

Searching for the Truth About Search Engines

It has been clear since the mid 1990s that search engines are central to the Internet and its use. The rise of Google as the bellewether Net company has made their pivotal nature even more apparent. But there has been surprisingly little formal analysis of the dynamics of this market.

Step forward Rufus Pollock, well known to readers of this blog as the main driving force behind the Open Knowledge Foundation:

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately ‘web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become house-hold names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different ‘participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these.

It has a handy short history of search engines, and then some rigorous economic analysis if you're into that sort of thing. (Via B2fxxx.)

Mark My Words

On Open Enterprise blog.

Tweedledee, Meet Tweedledum

I've noted before that Microsoft and Elsevier are, well, shall we say, kindred spirits. As Peter Suber observes, they're going to be getting even chummier now that Microsoft is acquiring the search company FAST:

FAST is the search technology Elsevier uses in Scirus, Scopus, and ScienceDirect.

Googling Eclipse

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Real Carrot to Use Open Source

This was new to me:

Carrot2 is an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine. It can automatically organize (cluster) search results into thematic categories

This is actually very useful, since it groups similar results together, and lets you sort through results by theme. There is an associated company, Carrot Search. (Via eHub.)

Public Domain Search

One of the big advantages of open content is that there are no problems with indexing it - unlike proprietary stuff, where owners can get unreasonably jumpy at the idea. Public domain materials are the ultimate in openness, and here's a basic search engine for some of them:

major public domain sites were chosen, the most important being the US federal government sites. government:

* .gutenberg.org
* .fed.us
* .gov
* .mil

But there are plenty of exclusions. Also, it's a pity this is only for the US: the public domain is somewhat bigger. (Via Open Access News.)

Google Desperately Seeking Picasa

What on earth took them so long?

Finally, Google has integrated Picasa Web Albums into Google Image Search. Public albums can be enabled for a public search option, meaning your images will be more likely to come up in Google image results. And that’s a huge improvement, because previously images on Picasa (and Blogger, and Google Docs) were not searchable at all. The other Google applications are still missing out on all the fun, but Picasa images are now searchable. This is limited, however, to a Google image search.

What's the point of having masses of open content if you can't find it? (Via Searchblog.)

New York Times Sees the Light and Opens Up

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

...

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

A nice vindication for the "make money by giving it away" approach, and testimony to the power of the Web 2.0 world, driven as it by search engines and user-generated content. (Via Boing Boing.)

Chinese Whispers

Here's another billion reasons why DRM'd music downloads will die out - and why copyright law will need to be rewritten:

Like millions of other young Chinese, he downloads them for free using Baidu.com (BIDU ), the country's biggest search engine. Baidu makes it so easy—just hit the MP3 tab on the home page, type in the name of the song, and click. What's more, Zhu doesn't believe he and his friends are doing anything wrong. "I think it's a problem with the law, not with us users," he says.

Reputation Management in the Age of Google

Here's one good reason why you might want to blog:

At the height of the cyber-abuse, Sue Scheff, a consultant to parents of troubled teens, would type her name in a Google search box and brace herself: Up would pop page after page of attack postings.

The solution? Fight negative Google hits with positive ones:

In December, Scheff turned to ReputationDefender, a year-old firm that promised to help her cleanse her virtual reputation. She no longer dreads a Google search on her name. Most of the links on the all-important first page are to her own Web site and a half-dozen others created by ReputationDefender to promote her work on teen pregnancy and teen depression.

Remember: if you don't manage your reputation online by participating, someone else might....

Funny Old Business.com

This is just a test to see if anyone's awake, right?

Entrepreneurs Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton were widely mocked for lavishing $7.5 million on a single Internet domain name -- business.com -- back in 1999. It was the single highest price paid for a domain name at the time.

Now look who is having the last laugh.

The company that grew out of business.com -- a search engine used by businesses to find products and services -- is now on the auction block, and could fetch anywhere between $300 million and $400 million, according to people familiar with the matter.

Me, it was me: I mocked back in 1999, and guess what: I'm mocking now, even more - about 50 times more.

The Eyes Have It

I'm not a great user of Baidu, for geographical and linguistic reasons. But this eye-tracking analysis that compares Baidu with Google is interesting for the light it sheds on how people use search engines.

Google + DoubleClick = GoogleClick

One consequence of Google's rather expensive acquisition of DoubleClick is that it turns the company from a search engine that sells ads into an advertising company that happens to have a search engine.

During Web 1.0, the accepted wisdom was that online advertising would never be viable as a revenue stream - the "real" money would have to come from somewhere else, such as subs or content purchased through micropayments. It will be interesting to see how things develop during Web 3.0...

Searching for an Answer

It was the arrival of the first-generation search engines like Yahoo and Lycos in the mid-1990s that turned a collection of disparate online data into a usable source of information. Today, Google's pivotal role in online activity is even more pronounced.

So it's no surprise that people are working on search engines for Second Life - the thinking being that once you can find anything there, it will be even more useful as a tool. But in virtual worlds, it's not so simple:

Second Life isn't the same as the World Wide Web (at least in how its users perceive it), and probably shouldn't be treated the same way as web pages, routinely scanned by search-engine bots. I'm pretty sure that Linden Lab would prefer to that Second Life be as permeable and open as the WWW, but it's got to take a definitive step in this direction. Currently, there is no true public data in Second Life: Linden Lab owns the data comprising the world, including user avatars and objects. On the other hand, the company's Terms of Service indicate that invasions of privacy are prohibited (section 4.1). I don't understand how user-privacy even exists in a world owned by one private entity. Any shift in resident privacy-expectations Second Life is ultimately up to Linden Lab, which hasn't seemed to have decided whether Second Life is a country or an internet--whether it is a government presiding over population of residents, or a service-provider to hundreds of thousands of users.

The problem is that most people put stuff on the Web because they want others to find it: there is a conscious act of exposing stuff there. In Second Life, people (naively) assume that it's "like" real life, in the sense that virtual objects are private unless explicitly exposed. Alas, no: anything in Second Life is just data, and as such susceptible to being farmed by search bots. As the post above points out, people must now decide now much privacy needs to be built into the system. Where the dividing line should be drawn between private and public in the virtual world is not at all obvious.

If Not Net Neutrality - What?

That old contrarian curmudgeon, Andrew Orlowski, has found a soul-mate in Richard Bennett: "[t]he veteran engineer played a role in the design of the internet we use today, and helped shaped Wi-Fi" as Orlowski explains before an interview. In addition,

Bennett argues that the measures proposed to 'save' the internet, which in many cases are sincerely held, could hasten its demise. Network congestion is familiar to anyone's whose left a BitTorrent client running at home, and it's the popularity of such new applications that makes better network management an imperative if we expect VoIP to work well. The problem, he says, is that many of the drafts proposed to ensure 'Net Neutrality' would prohibit such network management, and leave VoIP and video struggling.

The conversation that follows is extremely interesting, and certainly hits home. But I have big problems with this part:

They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank - to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else's. But it's not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it's technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.

These all seems very weak arguments in against net neutrality; I'd rather err on the side of hippy edge-to-edge goodness.