Search Briefs: YouTube Handed Out User Data (via Google Blogoscoped)
See Also: YouTube’s no friend to copyright violators (via News.com)
From the article:

YouTube has said it is working on new methods to help thwart copyright violations. The company has also said that it is not responsible for copyright violations; the users are.

That’s correct but we bet law firms and others are setting up monitoring firms as we speak to notify YouTube of problems. Not only in the video but also the underlying music that’s heard in home made music videos. Operations similar to how firms monitor eBay for problems. Find the violation and send out the DMCA request. However, it’s more than a YouTube issue. Granted YouTube now has Google and Google $$$ behind it but just because it’s been removed from YouTube doesn’t mean it’s still not available free somewhere. Btw, here are the searches we ran on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. All still return results. Lots of them.
In a few quick searches (really quick) of YouTube we found lots of material from Saturday Night Live, performances from the Jimmy Kimmel Show and NFL coverage from several networks.
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Pre-Print: Google Scholar and 100% Availability of Information
A pre-print from Jeffery Pomereantz at UNC. Some quick comments from Gary.
NOTE: As we placed the comments on the page we realized more and more that this excellent paper (interesting history too) talks about a universal library envisoned by the founder of OCLC. So the points that follow are not directly related to the topic of the paper. Nevertheless, we think they are still somewhat relevant to the service in general.
1) Excellent read as is whatever Jeff writes.
2) It’s hard to consider Google Scholar (at least as of today and the Google News Archive) a source (when compared to similar products) when no one knows (and we’ve asked) what’s in these databases. How often are they updated? What is their update schedule? How far back an archive for a specific journal might be available? You can limit your search by journal but no lists of journals or publications are available.
3) It’s also important to realize that the future (long term) of Google Scholar is not really known. Will the academic community change their tune if ads are placed on results pages?
4) Keep in mind what Google’s Marissa Mayer told BusinessWeek a few months ago:

Company officials concede that some of the newer products haven’t caught on. But they say a high failure rate is baked into their strategy — as it is for an increasing number of innovative companies. Marissa Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience, estimates that up to 60% to 80% of Google’s products may eventually crash and burn. But the idea, she says, is to encourage risk-taking and let surviving products truly thrive. “We anticipate that we’re going to throw out a lot of products,” says Mayer. “But [people] will remember the ones that really matter and the ones that have a lot of user potential.”

In other words, what does this mean (if anything) for Google Scholar and News Archive in the long term? What does it mean for other Google services that info pros come to rely on?

5) Comments from August about Google Scholar still not allowing a researcher (the type of person Google Scholar is aimed at) to review more than 1000 results (as is the case with any Google Search product). Again, in most cases this might not be an issue but with this type of material a searcher might want to download all of the citations and use one of many tools to look for patterns, stats, undiscovered material, etc. Similar products allow this. Actually this is important for the serious researcher.

6) Definition versus reality. What does Google consider a scholarly piece of material when it’s pulled from the web?
From the site:

Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research.

While it’s great to be recognized, we don’t think any definition of scholarly material would include ResourceShelf. Also, interesting to note, that one post from our blog is listed twice. Also, would Boulder, Colorado’s free weekly newspaper be considered scholarly or the newsletter from the Baseball Hall of Fame?

7) GS’s advanced search page offers the ability to limit by category. However, what criteria are they using to place articles in certain categories? How does Google define each category?

7) We were interested in seeing that many large schools as well as some notable small oness have not or are not (at least as of today) participating in Google Scholar linking program. (Very bottom of post.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 and is filed under Intellectual Property, Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.