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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 ian@FalsePositives.com links to some speculation about how a sufficiently competent search engine could write the news itself.
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.
Is that what Google scholar is going for? I guess it would end up as a pay service before long.
-mkb
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?
Google isn't linking to Keyhole here. Maybe is it to random users, or selected geographical areas.
So I go to Download Free Registration, and it says compatible with Windows for PC's. So I guess I won't be able to use it :(
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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.
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.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Excellent! As a postgrad CS student, I've been more or less relying on Citeseer 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!
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Yes, its interesting, however, it doesn't worth the money. You cannot find there any information that you cannot find anywhere else (e.g.: pictures from places that you want to visit). I think that Google is just trying to expand its business in order to find new ways to do money. The search engine competition is very hard these days. Google has brand recognition, so they must capitalize on it with other business.
ummm.... worldwind from NASA is free and seems to be the same thing...
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, 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.
The price is free when you have an Nvidia GPU, which I'm sure a lot of you do.
Click here 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.
You raise a valid point in there.. it reminds me of those large bookstores that took the market share in Canada.
Our local Chapters bookstore (an extremely large bookstore, with Starbucks, music, gifts, etc.) popped up, filled with wonderful chairs and beautiful features. After they destroyed the rest of the market, had their captive audience, the quality of service declined - the comfy chairs dissapeared because goodness, it cost far too much money to have people in there simply enjoying themselves and not consuming!
Interesting to see if Google follows the same model.. at least theres MSN search to keep them on their toes! Healthy competition is good, for the enduser at least.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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.
"If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried"
Not quite licenes plate reading, but getting there.
I think I'll put a brim on my tin-foil hat.
I downloaded and installed the 7-day free trial a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Google purchased the service and dropped the price of an annual subscription to a more reasonable level.
If they could have kept my DSL pipe full (or even occasionally full) when pulling down the image data I probably would have sprung for the subscription but the service was just unacceptably slow.
They do recommend that users have a broadband connection, so presumably the throughput will improve someday. However, if you're thinking about trying the service, do use enough of the free trial period to find out if it's fast enough for you.
Trusted by cats.
Don't worry. It's BETA. I'm sure Google will add support for Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Minix, RISC OS, Amiga, and OS/2 by the time they're done.
For more information, click here.
meaningless technobable, managementspeak, sentence fragments and misspelled words?
you want it? You already have it
Mission statement Generator
(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.")
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...
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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Don't Google Keyhole and Google Scholar seem rather remarkably like beta versions of the Earth and Librarian programs from Hiro's study in Snow Crash?
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
they seem to be having better and better ideas all the time...
Keyhole has been around for years, Google just recently bought them. I remember using the software about a year ago when it was just Keyhole.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
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.
that would be very cool in theory, but bittorrent has an extremely high latency, where keyhole would really only be useful if that is kept to a minimum.
How do you propose that we handle that problem?
Also, if we wanted to keep a few gigs worth of data on our machines why not just download all of the maps? A DVD distro would be nice as long as it had web updates.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
If we can monitor things so closely, can anyone explain to me why we can't watch iraq, or afganastan for movement by terrorists?
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The Government (actually the USGS) provides the aerial photography for places like http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
I saw the press release a few weeks ago announcing that Google had purchased Keyhole, and downloaded a copy. It's absolutely amazing.
The program still has a few rough edges, but even at this stage it's the most fun I've ever had for $30 - at least 10 times more entertaining than the $50 that I blew on Doom 3 ("every black pixel carefully rendered by hand").
Keyhole combined aerial photography with topographic data. It uses the topo data to construct a 3-D surface that maps to the actual terrain. It then lays the aerial photography down on the 3-D surface to provide a 3-D model of the terrain. You can fly through the 3-D space just like you were in a helicopter.
For mountainous areas the 3-D representation is eerily realistic. The skyline as viewed from my house looks PRECISELY like the view out my window.
You can also lay down custom images on top of the terrain. I took a trail map of the park by my house and easily laid it down on top of the park itself. By controlling the opacity of the map, I could easily use the map to help identify buildings and trails that I could see on the photos. There are lots of custom overlays on their bbs - so you can, for example, lay the nighttime light map of the world on top of the real world, and fade back-n-forth from the daytime view via keyhole and the nighttime view. Fun for answering the question, "so what city is THAT bright spot?"
Cities look a bit silly in 3D, since the topo data doesn't know about building heights. Manhattan is pretty flat, with lots of tall buildings painted on the ground. But mountains look unbelievably realistic.
I've shown it to about a dozen people since I got it, and at least 4 have purchased their own copy.
In short, it's an infinite timesink. Lots of fun.
It looks like the rooftops of the White House and the buildings next to it have had things drawn over them. Too bad... I wanted to check out the rumor I've always heard that there are anti-aircraft guns on the roof of 1600.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
---Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access.---
Actually, many journals these days allow open access for all articles after a certain amount of time, 12 months in some cases, 6 months in others.
---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. ---
Note that the PLOS journals are all being financed by heavy endowments, and the author pays method of publishing a journal has so far not been proven to be economically viable.
---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----
Do you really think that most scientific societies are out to make a profit? Most that I've been involved with do a great deal for their communities. Most are almost entirely funded through proceeds from the journals they publish. Take these away, and you lose all of the good deeds that societies do for scientists. Remove their ability to publish, and societies vanish, and then all of the journals are in the hands of the greedy for-profit publishers. Is this what you want?
---Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.---
Nope. You can search all you like on Google, but unless you subscribe to the journal, or the paper is open access, you can't read the full text.
This all may change with the proposed new NIH guidelines.