Search Battle Heading to Video
loid_void wrote to mention a Wired story covering the video search battle between the major portals. From the article: "As millions of broadband subscribers who missed a wardrobe-malfunction moment on TV can attest, the internet can be a convenient resource for finding much-talked-about events on video. Large net portals and a handful of smaller sites are looking to change that. In recent weeks, Yahoo, Google and MSN have each rolled out services designed to make it easier to upload or locate video online. The portals' rollouts come as a handful of startups and independent film sites are creating tools to make putting video online nearly as simple as publishing text."
While being able to search for video and images is great and all, I wonder if much more significant effort should be put into improving plain old text (technically, html/pdf/ps/doc/etc) document retrival?
It seems that on the major search engines (google/yahoo/msn), there hasn't been any radical improvement in this area since google first came onto the scene.
And, right now, it's not like these search engines are sufficiently close to perfection yet that there's little room for improvement. For a good number of types of queries, the signal to noisy ratio can be bit too low.
A good search engine will reliably steer people towards what they are looking for
If people who aren't looking for Mr. Goat-Se end up seeing him "on accident", that's a sign that the search engine sucks.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I like your solution, and I think it will happen eventually, but it's much more politically charged than you realize. If you think that everyone will be happy when it's possible for anyone to get "shit sex videos" on demand (even if they themselves never see them), you've got another think coming -- there are many, many people who think that there are some things that should not be available to anyone. Kiddie porn would be one obvious example.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Google would have a hell of time being a copyright cop; better to leave this function to the constantly shifting "grey" p2p world.
[1] unless the recent idea of a "permission culture" has overtaken your worldview.
Power to the Peaceful
.. there is no search battle. PR tell that there is one, because google is not paying to PR.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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You say:
.. so how's about an Open DRM standard .."
"Freaking trust people for once."
But you prefaced it with this:
"It'll probably need DRM for RIAA to play along
First off, the RIAA won't have the issue with this, the MPAA will.
Regardless... who gives a tin shit what the RIAA or MPAA want on this? They'll push for regulation regardless, so there's really no need to beat them to the punch on it.
The best part of the web is the unregulated part. After a while it gets too unruly (see Napster I), then there's a brawl, then things settle down and the consumers end up getting the shaft.
Why sacrifice the "wild west" part?
First off, the RIAA won't have the issue with this, the MPAA will.
When you pirate a movie, you pirate all the songs and all the recordings contained therein. The four major record labels (Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, and Universal) license their music and recording repertories to the six major movie studios (Sony, Disney, Warner, Fox, Paramount, and Columbia), and the labels don't want their copyrights wantonly infringed any more than the movie studios do.
I was recently trying to explain the humour in the following dialogue exchange from Army of Darkness to a friend, but he didn't get it. Maybe pasting together the two clips would work better.
Ash: Klaatu verrata nectu.
Wise man: Again.
Ash: Klaatu verrata nectu.
Wise man: Again.
Ash: I got it, I got it. I know your damn words, right?
[...time passes until the critical moment, Ash tries to remember...]
Ash: Klaatu verrata n... Necktie... Nickel... It's an "N" word, it's definitely an "N" word!
Ash: Klaatu verrata [under his breath] nekt agh agh ahh.
[The evil dead attack because of Ash's ignorance/arrogance/bluff]