Google Keyhole, Google Scholar

baegucb_18706 writes "The front page of Google has a link to Keyhole where you can download a free trial of satellite imagery. Is it worth the cost for a subscription, and is it the start of the real commercialism for Google? And a challenge to MS's imagery?" D H NG writes "According to CNET, Google introduced a new service for academics called Google Scholar on Wednesday. This service searches scholarly literature such as technical reports, theses and abstracts. This service will not carry ads." And finally, reader [e-mail] links to some speculation about how a sufficiently competent search engine could write the news itself.

Satelite imagery

Sure its nice, and fun to browse, but I don't see a real good consistent profit motive for providing satelite imagery. Who needs it that can't get it already at a local courthouse, etc.

Unless someone can show me otherwise.

Re:Satelite imagery

I think people want it right there, right then. I believe most people will get what they need from the 7 day trial.

It will be an amazing asset for schools and colleges etc. The 3d exploration module looks really good, and combined with being able to switch to a martian map, it increases it uses further.

I see some of the imagary is scanned at a 3inch resolution (Las vegas for example), but the majority of the planet is at the lesser 70cm-1m range.
3 inches! Just think about how detailed that is, they can see your Tin Foil Beany. They KNOW your wearing it.

I live in England and would love this software, but they don't seem to have the resolution here yet (London is down as a 70cm map, I'm nowhere near there so its useless...

Re:Satelite imagery

I remember reading once about an in-car guidance system in Japan that shows you directions to your destination in 3d real-world representations, like playing an FPS.

Now think about how Google recently grabbed up a small mapquest-like mapping company.

Just thinking aloud here, how much would Google stand to leap over the competition if it were to make software that functions like mapquest, only gives you the ability to fly around, looking at the route?

Re:Satelite imagery

Ok sure, but I imagine that surveyors seek out the tools they need, they don't expect them to be on the frontpage of google.

What I'm asking is "is the everyday joe blow going to be using a tool like this on a daily basis for something other than play?".

Re:Satelite imagery

I think the more relevant question is, will the average Joe Blow pay a monthly subscription for this just to occasionally play. I bet, and Google is betting, that the answer to that is yes. Look at all the other garbage people spend money on for play.

Also, why is using this "for play" not a valid reason for it to be offered?

Re:Satelite imagery

I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago when Google first bought keyhole. I showed it to my boss at work, and 5 minutes later we are iamging properties we manage and looking at potential new customers. Yeah, for Joe Blow it is useless, but for us it will become another key componant to generating business. It fits in perfectly for what we do, and only cost us $30. We'll use it constantly, and I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't posted on the front page.

lexis-nexis replacement

Is that what Google scholar is going for? I guess it would end up as a pay service before long.

Re:lexis-nexis replacement

My first thought when I read this was that Google could easily challenge Lexis-Nexis [lexisnexis.com] and Westlaw [westlaw.com] for their hold on the law school community in the US. While my wife was in law school I routinely helped her research cases using both of these services, and quite frankly their interface sucks. It took forever to find just about anything, and they had to continually pelt the students with free gifts just to keep them coming back. Google could potentially do very well in this area and I think there is certainly room for another competitor; especially one with Google's name recognition.

Re:lexis-nexis replacement

More a CiteSeer [psu.edu] replacement, I think. The idea behind CiteSeer is that in academic computer science, most researchers (and most conferences and journals) make their papers available for free on the web, but there are so many of them and so many places to look that actually finding a paper that's relevant to your research is really hard. The CiteSeer folks realized that web spiders could do a very good job of indexing all those papers and putting them in a searchable form and that it was much cheaper (computationally, financially, effort-wise) than traditional approaches like Lexis/Nexis. CiteSeer has been available for free for years, and Google Scholar seems like it's just a much better interface to the same idea, so I don't see any reason why they'd turn it into a pay service.

Re:lexis-nexis replacement

I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.

It is also helpful for academics who need to show that their published papers are being cited. Helps with grant applications and tenure review, I would assume.

NASA?

Is this not very similar to what NASA are doing? NASA's is free, but I think Google's has a much better resolution and can zoom in more detail. However, I remember a while back NASA saying they would probably support Open Source in the near future with their project?

Not Such Link

Google isn't linking to Keyhole here. Maybe is it to random users, or selected geographical areas.

Re:Not Such Link

Ah ha! It does appear in the Google Tools, but not on the front page.

Re:Writing the nes itself?

meaningless technobable, managementspeak, sentence fragments and misspelled words?

you want it? You already have it
Mission statement Generator [dilbert.com]

(in a life imitating art moment, I am currently looking at a job application that wants me "To exploit all synergies within the group and drive through efficiencies via excellent operational planning.")

Authors

From the website:
I'm an author. Why would I want my articles in Google Scholar?

Your work likely has great value to a number of people who may not know it exists. By including your articles in Google Scholar, others will be more likely to find them, learn from them, cite them and build on the foundation you have laid.


Sounds like a good way to make yourself known in the writing world. For now, it sounds like a kickass idea. Go Google.

Not a big deal

So Google included Keyhole in its list of tools, which now takes another click (on more >> from the google homepage) to get to it. Heaven forbid that Google would do anything remotely business-like.

Quite frankly, Google is a corporation, and if they can help Keyhole get a few more customers (who need the service for whatever reason) while making a few dollars on the side, I think we should accept it as completely legitimate.

And no, I don't think this is the start of a slippery slope of Google into outrageous commercialism.

Scholar search!

Excellent! As a postgrad CS student, I've been more or less relying on Citeseer [psu.edu] and Google to search for literature online. Citeseer is really useful, but I find its search rather cumbersome. If Google can create a specialty search for academic papers...I'm more than thrilled! Go Google!

Re:Scholar search!

Use the author: prefix [google.com]

Worldwind

ummm.... worldwind [nasa.gov] from NASA is free and seems to be the same thing...

EPIC

That last link, http://poynterextra.org/epic/ [poynterextra.org], is really interesting. But the key technological turning point, where Google comes up with a magic algorithm to combine and rewrite multiple news stories to generate a customized, nuanced, original news story for each reader, is not grounded in reality.

Rewriting English is similar to summarizing it. Using clever tricks, computers are about as good at writing a précis of a block of text as a dull 3rd grader -- every such summary lacks nuance, because the computer that generated it lacks understanding. All there is, is tricks. So the idea that an algorithm can be taught not only to understand the meaning of news stories that were written by humans, but then to rewrite them adaptively, is pure science fiction.

My favorite example of this is Cyc [cyc.com], a project to feed into a database all the propositions which some believe constitute "common sense." For example, Cyc knows that dogs and cats are mammals, and that they are common pets, so one could tell it "I have a mammal as a pet," and it could deduce that I have a dog or a cat or maybe something else. In the early 1990s, when the project was getting started, its researchers believed that in about five years, it would be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it well enough to assimilate into its database. At that point, of course, it would start absorbing all the knowledge in the world until it became the smartest encyclopedia there was.

And then in the last 1990s, its researchers were again interviewed, and again they said that it would soon be intelligent enough to read plain English text on its own and understand it. When? In about five years. For any time T, strong AI is always about five years away.

So I'm amused that the strong AI postulated in that excellent Flash animation, the key which allows "big media" to die off because computers will do custom rewrites of amateur news dispatches and form newsfeeds of their own, comes to pass in... about five years. I don't think the New York Times has much to worry about.

Price

The price is free when you have an Nvidia GPU, which I'm sure a lot of you do.

Click here [nvidia.com] to get an Nvidia only free(beer) version. Their site seems to be down at the moment, which is odd for such a large company, but when it comes back up, you can get it from there. There are many other cool programs you can get for free if you have an Nvidia card while you are there.

Keyholes Maps

I think keyhole has more Sat. Imagery of Iraq and Afghanistan, than all of the U.S. put together. This is pretty much a good way to tell if you are on the US hit list, when more and more Imagery is available for your Counrty (At least in the Middle East, otherwise Italy and Greece need to watch their asses). Otherwise, I think this is a great step for Google to take if they are developing their own in-house MapQuest. Plus it is too much fun spinning the planet in circles.

3 inches

Hmmm, Cambride Massachusetts is imaged down to a 3 inch resolution. I wonder what they did to deserve that.

Not quite licenes plate reading, but getting there.

I think I'll put a brim on my tin-foil hat.

Worries about Scholar

The only thing I worry about with scholar, after giving it a whirl, is that some newer papers that have recently been published dont appear, since it seems it builds its index off of citations first. I worry that if Scholar does take hold, newer more obscure papers that may not get the publicity of more mainstream journals and venues of publication will never be seen again (This is all reliant on their indexing model not getting better). Perhaps i'll have to start submiting abstracts of my work to Google as well now...

So it's basically CiteSeer?

Google Scholar basically seems to be an attempt to replace CiteSeer. It doesn't seem to have quite as many features in terms of displaying information as CiteSeer does, but it does have the important features, and it does lack a couple of the longstanding problems with CiteSeer (for example, that CiteSeer is absurdly slow)...

I am curious which produces better search results. Google seems to produce its results mainly from a handful of sources, but a couple of tests showed it giving more relevant results than CiteSeer, and Google Scholar also immediately returned a copy of this one specific article I was trying to find awhile back that I knew to exist but couldn't find either on CiteSeer or Google normal search... Hmm.

At any rate CiteSeer indexes 716797 articles and Google Scholar... interestingly, doesn't provide an index size number at all.

Google is thinking outside the box...

Google is clearly making an effort to consider ALL the different kinds of information available on the web. They've grown the idea of a search engine from simply something that indexes HTML pages to include PDFs, Office documents, images, news, products, etc...
This shows some initiative and creativity in trying to develop new ways for people to find all kinds of information, both on your desktop and on the Internet... just imagine when they get all this stuff integrated... you could search for a friend's address, and not only get a map of their house, but a satellite-guided view of the trip, as well as links to their website, public photo collection, slashdot and blog posts, e-mails you've written them, and scholarly articles they've written. Google wants to be a total information provider, and they're the only ones truly pulling all of this stuff together.

Re:Google is thinking outside the box...

This shows some initiative and creativity in trying to develop new ways for people to find all kinds of information,

Well, in the case of Google Scholar, it's a late entry into the market. It also threatens to derail some significant public and free efforts at making scholarly information available on the web. Altogether, I'm not convinced that Google Scholar is something to be welcomed.

most online scientific journals not free

Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access. The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification.

I find this a bit ironic. Science is an epistomological enterprise of creating knowledge by the open publication of results. However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges.

Even the index services like Scientific Citations, GeoRef, Lexus-Nexus, etc. charge high fees. Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.