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November 06, 2005

Google Allowing for Copyright Filtering in Advanced Search

Google's advanced search page, at http://www.google.com/advanced_search, now allows for filtering by materials which allow some forms of re-use and materials which can be freely modified, adapted, and built upon.

I did a search for "Randy Cassingham", who's the guy behind This is True and is about to release a new book. I did the most restrictive copyright filter search possible, for those pages which allow content to be freely modified, adapted, and built upon. I got only a couple of results, both for blogs which mention him.

Here's the problem.

That initial search had only a few results, at the end of which was the usual "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

When I clicked on that, I got over 61,000 results! These searches are obviously NOT filtered by copyright considerations since the first result is Randy's own ThisIsTrue, which is very protected by copyright. Here's what's even weirder; when I did a test search on the regular Google for "Randy Cassingham", I actually got FEWER results (over 60,000) than I did for the altered copyright search!

Google's copyright filter search is very tight and the experiments I got gave nice results, but that "In order to show the most relevant results..." message at the end could really mislead someone to think their extended search is still running under a copyright filter. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that might be a problem?...

Posted to Search Engines-Google | TrackBack


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