The judge overseeing the Google Books case has laid out the schedule for the second round of the final approval process, at the same time granting preliminary approval of the revised deal.
Like before, opponents of Google's settlement with groups representing authors and publishers will have a comment period in which to file objections, and books rights holders who want to preserve their abilty to sue Google for scanning their books will have an opt-out deadline. The final hearing is set for February 18 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
After numerous interest groups and the Department of Justice objected to Google's original settlement over digital books scanning, the parties submitted a revised settlement late Friday night that amended the size of the class affected by the deal and wrote into the document explicit guarantees regarding access to the scanned material that were previously mere promises.
This wasn't enough to satisfy Google's most persistent critics, however, who will likely fill Judge Denny Chin's mailbox with objections to the revised settlement much the same way they did prior to the original September deadline. After the DOJ filed its own set of objections, final approval of the settlement was delayed until the parties could work out something more amenable to the government.
Opponents will have until January 28th to file objections with the court. That's also the same date for affected class members to decide whether or not they would like to opt out of the amended agreement.
Rights holders who opted out of the previous agreement also have until January to decide if they would like to opt into the revised agreement, otherwise the court will assume they still wish to opt out. Those who missed the deadline the first time around have a second chance to opt out by January 28th.
Google released a statement regarding the court filing. "The preliminary approval order sends a positive initial message; this agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form. We remain hopeful that the agreement will receive final approval from the court and will realize the goal of significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web."
The Open Books Alliance, which has vigorously opposed the settlement, weighed in a little later with a statement of their own.
"Today, in an expected procedural move, Judge Denny Chin granted preliminary approval to the revised Settlement of Google's copyright infringement lawsuit. This is not a surprising development and is not any indication that the court will or will not accept the terms of Settlement 2.0. The same procedural preliminary approval was given to Settlement 1.0, and now sets up a court process that will allow those opposed to the revised settlement to let their objections known to the court. The U.S. Department of Justice has until February 4th to weigh in with the court, as their investigation into the matter continues."
Yahoo is adding more context to news searches, bringing photos, videos, and even tweets into its search results page.
Searchers on Yahoo--who are dwindling--will find new results for newsy events Thursday, when Yahoo launches new tabs on the Yahoo News Shortcut. You've long been able to find links to news stories about a given search query through the shortcut, but you can now find other ways of telling the story with the new tabs, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.
Yahoo may be close to finalizing a deal to outsource the back end of its search business to Microsoft, but it insists that it's still a competitive search company with its decision to focus its research and development on new ways of presenting search results. The new shortcut is one such improvement, although one that's not all that different from what can be found on Google and Bing.
The main difference is that Yahoo will now provide the option of browsing images or tweets related to a given query without having to leave the search results page to click over to the Yahoo News section, Cornett said. Bing surfaces photos and video in its News section but not necessarily in its main search results page, and Google takes a similar approach.
Yahoo is using Twitter's public API to surface tweets, which are also run through a Yahoo algorithm to determine relevancy, Cornett said, declining to provide details on exactly how that works. Yahoo has not secured access to the "firehose" of tweets, whereas Microsoft and Google just signed deals for access to that data as part of their own bid to index tweets.
Google is ready to launch an ambitious attempt to provide captions for videos on YouTube.
The company is holding an event in Washington, D.C., on Thursday to announce that it has developed a way to use the voicemail transcription technology in Google Voice to allow videos to be uploaded to YouTube with captions automatically generated. Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, will host the event highlighting Google's work in bringing this technology to YouTube.
Ever since 2006, Google has allowed those uploading videos to first Google Video, and then YouTube, to place captions in their videos so that deaf or hearing-impaired viewers can follow what's going on. However, there's only about 100,000 videos on YouTube (out of the hundreds of millions on the site) that use the caption option because of the time and expense of transcribing a video, uploading a caption, and timing it properly to the action onscreen.
Warning that results may vary at first, Google engineers later this week plan to turn automatic captioning loose on the YouTube Education channel for videos in English. YouTube will also activate a feature that lets video uploaders do their own transcription but syncs up the timing of the caption itself, so long as all the words in the video are present in the text file uploaded along with the video.
Google plans to demonstrate the automatic caption technology later on Thursday.
Google Labs is testing a new way of viewing images that it is calling Image Swirl. When you search for a term in Image Swirl, 12 different sets of related images appear.
For example, if you search for "Kentucky," you will get sets of Kentucky state maps, Kentucky flags, the Kentucky Derby, and various scenery of the state. As you drill down further into the results, you get to see more tightly refined sets of images based on what you choose.
A search for Paris' Arc de Triomphe on Google Image Swirl.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Image Swirl's interface is very similar to Google's Wonder Wheel. It also employs Google's previously developed technology for finding similar images as well as facial recognition. This is definitely a smarter image search than what we are used to.
Unfortunately, Image Swirl is not available for all search terms currently. It is reserved for 200,000 terms (which auto-complete in the search box) that Google has deemed worthy of being included. The company did say, however, that it plans to add more queries to the list moving forward.
So what do you think? Is Image Swirl cool? Lame? Important? Irrelevant? Let us know in the comments.
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Comscore)
Yahoo continues to lose share in the search market, as Google and Microsoft pick up the difference.
Comscore's measurement of the U.S. search market in October shows that Google--as usual--still dominates the search landscape. It now watches 65.4 percent of all searches pass through its servers, up 0.5 market share points from September of this year.
Yahoo, on the other hand, is going in the other direction as new friend Microsoft reaps the benefits. Yahoo lost 0.8 market share points in October compared to September, now down to 18 percent of the market. It has been in a steady decline this year, as Microsoft has gained share with the relaunch of Bing: Microsoft almost cracked the 10 percent barrier in October with 9.9 percent of all searches, gaining 0.5 percentage points compared to September.
Total searches grew 3 percent from September to October. Searches done through Google increased 5 percent and those done through Microsoft increased 8 percent. Yahoo searches decreased by 1 percent over the same period.
Aimchair lawyers using Google have a new resource for finding legal opinions.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)It may not satisfy the needs of Google's lawyers as they research antitrust law, but Google Scholar now offers the full text of numerous legal opinions from throughout U.S. history.
The company announced Tuesday that Google Scholar users now have the option of searching for specific opinions related to broad topics, like copyright or desegregation, as well as famous cases like Brown vs. Board of Education and Roe vs. Wade. Google Scholar also points to academic papers and other research material, making it useful for those who are scouring the Web for scholarly information on a given topic.
Given the vast number of legal opinions produced every day in the U.S., however, completeness should not be expected. That means anyone doing serious legal research in preparation for an upcoming case likely won't be able to drop their LexisNexis accounts. But more casual searchers should be able to find several interesting and famous cases from throughout history without having to sign up for the U.S. federal court system's PACER Web site.
Google acknowledged that it's not the first organization to go down this road. "We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of several pioneers, who have worked on making it possible for an average citizen to educate herself about the laws of the land: Tom Bruce (Cornell LII), Jerry Dupont (LLMC), Graham Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray (AustLII), Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org), Daniel Poulin (LexUM), Tim Stanley (Justia), Joe Ury (BAILII), Tim Wu (AltLaw) and many others," the company said in a blog post announcing the new service.
You'll still have to figure out what all the accents mean, but Google now provides a phonetic spelling of translated words.
(Credit: Google)Google made several improvements to Google Translate Monday, such as the ability to translate words written with unique character sets with their phonetic spelling.
Google has been steadily adding languages to Google Translate over the last couple of years, but if the language used a completely unfamiliar character set--such as the Roman-character based languages like English or Spanish versus Chinese characters--the service was only useful for those trying to write in the language. Now Google Translate will help those trying to translate English into Chinese for speaking purposes by providing a phonetic version of the translation in Roman characters.
Those trying to translate English into Hebrew, Arabic, or Persian will have to wait for the phonetic option, but Google has also added a feature that lets an English (or any other language) speaker phonetically spell out a word in Arabic, Persian, or Hindi and get a translation of that word in its native character set. And for those trying to translate other languages into English, Google has added a link that produces an audio version of the word or phrase in English.
New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.
What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.
The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.
In a nutshell it goes like this: FactRank goes through each Web page or source (in whatever index it's searching from) finding semantic tip-offs like declarative sentences. It then cross references each of those against one another, surfacing some of the most relevant ones to the top, as well as factoring in the order of how they appeared. What the user then gets is a tidy list of statements, each of which is sourced and given a level of relevancy based on their appearances in all of the indexed source pages combined.
Whew. Got that? Great, here's an example of what it looks like in motion, as seen on a basic search for Sarah Palin on Twitter:
One of the Factery Labs example applications is a search engine that finds facts from Twitter source results.
(Credit: CNET)Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?
The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."
Along with maintaining a blacklist of these bad sites, FacteryLabs also keeps a list of good sources, or ones that continuously deliver. The more often an author successfully recommends a usable page, the faster they'll accumulate rank among the results.
What you can play with today
As for applying that technology to some consumer products, Factery Labs is launching with a handful of development partners, each of which has already built a tool that makes use of FactRank. The most notable one comes from Sobees which is using the service to add relevancy to Twitter and FriendFeed search results--something that's no small feat.
Users can do a search on Sobees' Silverlight-based Twitter client as usual, but there will now be a FactRank button that can sort through those tweets. It does a quick once-over of all of the results, and will filter the most relevant information to the very top. Included in each of its results is also a shortlist of the facts it finds on every page.
One of the first third-party apps to make use of Factery Labs is Sobees, which is adding its fact finding filters and relevancy tools to Twitter and FriendFeed search.
(Credit: Factery Labs)Advanced users might find more utility in an updated version of Ultimate Info, an extension for Firefox that does a number of things with on-page data. Starting Tuesday, it will let users select links on a page, each of which gets the fact-finding treatment using FactRank.
In our demo, Gaddis used Ultimate Info on the front page of popular site Drudge Report, highlighting about six or seven URLs that were on the page, then running a FactRank query, which brought in its fact results in just a few seconds. As Pedersen explained, users could run something similar on a long article (or several long articles about the same subject), and FactRank's algorithm would be able to provide a fact summary in short order.
Not launching on Tuesday but where the company expects to see the most development is on mobile devices. "Our analysis shows that mobile devices are a prime target for this technology because the latency produces a lot of resistance in the browse experience," said Pedersen. Instead of a user just getting back a link dump of all the URLs it finds, the FactRank engine will go out, process those results, then deliver users with a summary of the best selection of facts--a move that will save the end user from having to wait for any extra pages to load.
If you want to give some of the third party Factery Labs tools a run, you can find them on the company's implementations section. There you'll also find a test search engine that's running off of Twitter's index.
The next time you search Google for life expectancies or number of Internet users in the U.S., you'll find the specific figures plus an interactive chart letting you compare the U.S. with other countries.
Since Wednesday, Google has been tapping into data from the World Bank to provide key details and interactive charts on specific topics along with its own search results. The goal is to better help you search for and compare certain types of public data.
The World Bank is providing Google with facts and figures on 17 key indicators, including population growth, fertility rate, gross national product, and energy use.
Enter one of the 17 indicators into a Google search. You can phrase it as the specific indicator, for example, "population world," or type it as a natural question: "What is the population of the world?"
At the top of the search results, you'll find a thumbnail chart along with the latest statistics. (According to the World Bank, 72.4 percent of the U.S. population is on the Internet as of 2008.) Click on the chart or accompanying link, and up pops a larger interactive graph where you can visually compare the U.S. with other countries by clicking on their check boxes.
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Google)
You can embed the chart's HTML in your own blog or Web page and opt for the data to be updated automatically anytime the World Bank's information changes. Finally, a link for more info brings you directly to the World Bank's Web site where you can dig further into the results of your search.
This latest partnership with World Bank is part of Google's effort to offer data beyond that which it can grab from your average Web page. Back in April, the search giant started integrating stats and charts from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the World Bank is the first source to provide global data for Google. The World Bank's figures come from its World Development Indicators (WDI), a collection of data derived from its own research and that of 30 other sources. The global data includes statistics on social, financial, and environmental areas encompassing more than 100 different countries.
... Read moreUnlike when you stand over your coworker's desk, Microsoft's Bing search engine actually works better when you hover.
One of the key features of the would-be rival to Google is that when you hover to the right of a result, you can get a preview of what to expect. As part of an update this week, Bing's hover result will now feature more information including a thumbnail preview of the site in question.
Microsoft is using Wolfram Alpha to help power certain results, such as this search for the fat content of french fries.
(Credit: CNET News)One of the ongoing challenges for Bing, besides just getting more people to use the site, is letting them know that the hover feature is there. Microsoft's research has shown it gets high usage from those who know about it, but also finds that lots of people don't know the feature is there. Microsoft has been experimenting with some different visual cues that might make it easier to stumble upon the previews.
The hover feature was developed by the San Francisco-based team that Microsoft acquired as part of last year's acquisition of Powerset. Powerset, which developed a semantic search technology, also powers Bing's index of Wikipedia.
Bing's fall update update also includes the first fruits of a deal with Wolfram Alpha. As part of that arrangement, certain health related searches, such as "how many calories in a hamburger" will now feature information from Alpha. Bing will also rely on Alpha for some math calculations, Microsoft said in a blog posting on Wednesday. Wolfram noted that Microsoft is one of the first customers for a commercial licensing program that was formally announced several weeks ago.
Other changes to Bing include improved local results for topics such as weather and events.
It's all part of a wave of updates Microsoft is making to Bing this week. On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is moving its MSN Video site under the Bing umbrella, with a new video page that can be used to watch videos from places like Hulu and elsewhere.
The company also announced some enhancements to Bing Maps, including the ability to use the mouse to alter a suggested route and have one's directions re-calculated.
The improvements come as Microsoft is looking for ways to stand out from Google as it tries to wrest share from its much larger rival. The software maker has seen a modest uptick but faces steep hurdles in trying to make more significant gains.
Experian Hitwise said Wednesday that Bing's share reached 9.57 percent in October. That's up from 8.96 percent in September, but still well behind Google, which had more than 70 percent and Yahoo, with 16 percent of the U.S. search query market.
While adding features is clearly important, trying to stay ahead in the search game can be quite a challenge. Just hours after Microsoft announced a deal last month to index real-time tweets from Twitter, Google announced plans to do the same.
Microsoft has also gotten some unwanted attention for one of its features--the Bing Cashback program--where users can get a portion of their online transactions rebated by starting off on Bing. A blog posting outlined a flaw in the mechanism that could allow people to get cash back without ever spending money via Bing.
That posting was pulled after a
