Disney wins Mickey Mouse patent for torrent-excluding search engine Disney has been awarded a patent for an “Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements.” The patent will interest many because Disney says “Embodiments … enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the …
"We patent the right to throw in a 'magic' weighting factor for searching, that we won't exactly specify at this time, called (in the current case) 'Authenticity'. Any future entity that wants to create a new factor for their searches, no matter what they may wish call it, will have to come to us."
It could be in the nature of a defensive patent, to prevent anyone else patenting it and withholding licenses. If Disney develop a working model and supply it to anyone on their Nice list for a peppercorn rent, they could hope to make their money back by increased movie sales.
Of course, anyone with enough money to fight this patent automatically gets add to the Nice list. and it's another line of attack against those on the Naughty list, such as torrent sites that use feedback and rankings. (So it would be a bad move to let it become a standard, or FRAND would apply).
I would think it's likely to be used as a legal tactic. They can take a search engine to court over displaying search results, and tell them, "Oh, you can use our method to do this". Pledge that anyone doing so won't be taken to court for that, they just have to pay a small amount of protection money royalties and they are safe.
This is Disney we're talking about. When it comes to mean, they make Dick Butkus look like a cub scout helping a little old lady across the street. After loosing rights to a character he considered his own, he waged a lifelong war to purchase and destroy every copy of the work that existed.
A cursory look gives one the impression that it could be legally used to censor anything.. not just video/music pirating. I wonder if their next step will be sue Google to use it? Then again, they needed a patent for this? Why not just start their own search engine and all will be well in FantasyLand.
A search engine is supposed to work for the user, not some unrelated organisation.
If the film studios want stop me from accessing piracy websites, then they'd be wiser to come up with a legal alternative that lets me purchase films to play on my Linux-based XBMC media center system. Why can't I do this already in 2014!?
I have to agree.
A search engine should be a database of web pages, along with a front end to query that database and display the results. Those results shouldn't be taken down: If you want rid of the content, take down the content. If the content exists, it should exist in the database.
I believe there would be a market for a new search engine which did exactly that, along with better filtering and sorting than e.g. Google. Google has become pretty pants in some situations.
On this note, Google, if I search for something, I don't want you to search for "similar" words (which are normally very different in the context I am using them). Return me the results I ask for, not what you think I should be searching for, and not what someone has paid you to show me!
The search engine is called Amazon.
> Clickety Click.
> "Buy now"
> "Due to licensing restrictions, this content is not available for your region"
> ????
> Torrent me this shit!
Anyone who implements "licensing restrictions" deserves to be pirated to death into a festering heap of maggoty shares and unredeemable debt.
Yeah what a fabulous idea. Lets go back to days when the search parser was so dumb that not knowing exactly the right adjective meant I couldn't find the page at all. That the index had no concept of relationships or usage. And the best keywords you can think of return 150,000 pages in an order best described as random. Right back to the days of frikking yore.
I think some people have little comprehension as to the amount of work necessary to make an index of 50 billion pages usable with only having to use a few keywords.
I'll keep as is thank you.
2 tips: either use "advanced search" or just write it down on paper.
Why the hyperbole? He was clearly talking about a period not too distant, say 6 or 7 years ago, when Google honoured search qualifiers along with the query. Plus, minus, site:, quotation marks, etc. Now they just discard most of them, if not all. And no, faffing around with advanced search is not really a substitute, it's too time-consuming. Neither are preferences, if you use a lot of different computers/devices/browsers/networks.
If there is a search prefix available to say "yes, I really-really meant to type what I just typed" then I haven't found it yet. And have dropped Google for other reasons anyway.
Yep, there IS a verbatim option. Thanks!
According to this link, it appeared in late 2011, when + operator was dropped. But quotation marks got lost at some later point.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/google-verbatim-search-tool_n_1097443.html
Have I been living without Google for three years? Gosh.
Curiouser and curiouser. Verbatim option is located on the sidebar, left of the results. But this sidebar may or may not appear, depending on browser and god knows what else. That may explain how I've not noticed it before - my main browser never displays that sidebar. Even with enabled JS and lowered security.
Putting string &tbs=li:1 into the URL will do the trick. Thus it's possible to make literal searches default for the browser search field. Generic command like nospell: would be nice, but quick search didn't find any such.
More useful URL options
stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-search-url-request-parameters/
www.teknoids.net/content/google-search-parameters-2012
>There's a 'verbatim' button ... that appears [TO] deliver the results I was looking for.
It doesn't deliver the results I was looking for: obviously, it doesn't deliver any results that are not in the index, which I guess means that it is (now) impossible to search on "punctuation", which is important for code searchs. And there are a number of other searchs (which I can't remember now) which used to be possible and are not possible now.
This is different that it was when I was a boy: Google has, I guess, "optimised" their search engine as well as their search commands, and if it is better for finding popular search items, it is definitely worse for finding specific information, which was one of my particular use cases.
Show of hands: How many of you have used ``I'm feeling lucky'' in the last month? In the last year?
It's been multiple years in my case, up until I simply quit using Google.
When they first came out, I was blown away by how good they were, and easily 1/4--1/2 the time, the Lucky button took me to what I wanted. If, as I suspect, its use has been dropping steadily (or even precipitately), that drop is directly related to the quality of their results. Too bad their usage hasn't dropped accordingly.
A search engine is supposed to be whatever the creator wanted it to be, in most current cases they wanted it to be a way of making money.
If google isn't searching the way you want it too, may I suggest you pick a different search engine? Or stick with google and keep complaining if that makes you feel better.
If google isn't searching the way you want it too, may I suggest you pick a different search engine?
I have tried. Nothing else I have tried does what I want either.
The most irritating bit is that Google used to do what I wanted, most of the time. It was fast, efficient and accurate. Now it only does what I want some of the time, and often decides that I don't really want what I told it I wanted, and searches for something else instead.
I do think there is a market for a search engine which returns the results you requested, rather than assuming you are an idiot. Something which searches for what you want, not what it thinks your should want, or what it wants to sell to you.
That would be tough to do considering Disney ALSO owns ABC and ESPN not to mention the Touchstone Pictures label for their non-kiddy content. It's like trying to boycott Walmart. You can try, but odds are you'll be paying more money, wasting gas, or (if no alternative is available) just plain starving.
This is an interesting one.
Noone can compete with google on merit: giving us the users genuinely useful search results. So wannabes attack them through the courts and sometimes through the meeja instead.
Now next time there's a fuss about something in google results[1], all they need to do is run a big publicity campaign saying the Goog isn't doing enough, and look, here's something they can and should (nay, must) do ... it's all there published ... criminally negligent that they're not doing it already. Kerching!
[1] Jihadi John threatens feminist troll with copyrighted video of under-age kiddie involved in Bad Things ... hmm, Lord of the Flies, or Wozzeck, or ... well, you get my drift.
This sort of thing (and their well-known stance on copyright) makes me as far from being a Disney fan as one possibly can be - but I simply can't bring myself to hate them quite as much as I'd like considering they just went and released more or less the whole Lucasarts back-catalog for sale on GOG, DRM-free. Arrrrrgh! KHAAAAAAAAN!!!
User input? Could be somewhat unpredictable results.
But - just another *we* *must* *think* *of* *the* *children/feminists/terrorists/anti-establishement/antiTPP/antiChristian/anti(whateveriscurrentdramalama)* censorship in a white hat and cane, purring in the public ear "I can keep you warm and safe and cosy in your bubblewrapped, insulated consumer of all the pap role".
(I think i need more coffee)
"enable the filtering of undesirable search results, such as results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like.”
They have a legitimate interest in preventing piracy.
They can, of course, do or patent anything as far as I'm concerned because it will eliminate child pornography.
No mention of terrorism - come on Disney, you must do better!
piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like
I think Disney just said piracy is equivalent to child pornography. Seriously? Even if we could all agree those are both "bad" (which is in doubt), they are bad in completely different ways. Only the most fanatic free-marketeer would suggest that the main problem with child pornography is that the performers aren't bring properly compensated. In fact I think most people would agree that when it comes to CP, authenticity is directly correlated with "bad".
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