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

[suso]

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.

lexis-nexis replacement

[mmkkbb]

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

NASA?

[Clemensa]

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?

Authors

[endlessoul]

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.

Scholar search!

[Xpilot]

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:Satelite imagery

[LiquidCoooled]

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

[swordboy]

but I don't see a real good consistent profit motive for providing satelite imagery.

I know surveyors who use terraserver multiple times per day. It is a vital tool for them.

Re:Not a big deal

[_Pinky_]

I completely agree... Google provides ads, but not obtrusive, like other sites. This just falls in the same line.

I don't have the link when I hit the main page, but even so, it's a link. You don't want the service, don't click on it...

It's not a popup, it's not tricking people to click on it... and if it helps google continue providing the service they provide, I'm for it...

Re:lexis-nexis replacement

[calibanDNS]

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.

Keyholes Maps

[IndigoZenith]

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

[notthepainter]

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.

Keyhole needs throughput capacity

[rwebb]

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.

Re:Not a big deal

[Nutshell_TA]

Google acquired Keyhole http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/keyhole.html [google.com] so linking to them from their Google tools is totally legitimate IMHO

Re:Satelite imagery

[CreatureComfort]

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?

Worries about Scholar

[3rd_Floo]

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?

[mcc]

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...

[mogrify]

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:Keyholes Maps

[dustbowl]

Go take a look in Israel; IIRC, the US Govt place a limit on the detail level that could be displayed for Israel, something like 2km, which would only be increased if a competing service from outside the US went to a higher resolution. I roughly found where my apartment might be though. At 31"09'41.35N and 34"43'41.20E there seems to be some censorship going on maybe?

Re:Price

[teeheehee]

Not exactly. It's similar to the LT version where you get a free trial account for 7 days, but then you'll still have to pay. For LT, it's $29.95 for a year, and for NV it's $24.95 [LT [keyhole.com] and NV [keyhole.com]]

I purchased this service about a year ago for NV, before the buyout by Google. Their NV version was $10 cheaper than the LT version. I forget the cost at the moment.

I tried them out after hearing they were the service used by the news media (CNN I think) during the latest Iraq war to display the area and mountainous regions where troops were travelling. They may have used the Pro version, which lets you script something like flights over all the data and display it without the interface by exporting it as a movie. I think Pro also lets you hold more of the images cached so you don't have to stream them if you don't need to.

I've also used the NASA software, which is free. The Keyhole one seems to have more data currently, and is all streamed as needed for consumer versions, whereas the NASA software was a more kludgy and came with several large images right away, making for a bigger install. Also, NASA had some problems with their image streaming servers which meant every area you wanted to focus in on with higher granularity you had to download another set of large images for. Granted, it's also nice to have the images on my own machine so I can view them in other applications, I don't think everyone who wants to view the Earth this way wants to download all the images they will view (it's a usability issue.)

The Keyhole software is easy to adapt to, quite powerful in features, hasn't had a problem with their streaming servers for as long as I've used it, has other data layers it can display (districts, crime rates, school zones, etc.) and also has images of Mars. I hope the NASA one picks up the pace a bit, I haven't renewed my Keyhole subscription yet (even though it's cheaper now) because I haven't made as much use of it as of late.

P.S. If either Keyhole or NASA developers are reading this, please include driving directions features as I would want so desparately to use this over Mapquest or Yahoo's services. If the NASA stuff goes OS, perhaps I'll look into helping make that possible (hint, hint!)

Re:Keyhole

[jessecurry]

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.

Re:Satelite imagery

[keefebert]

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.

Keyhole is astonishingly good!

[SamDrake]

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.

Re:Google is thinking outside the box...

[geg81]

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.

Re:Google is thinking outside the box...

[mogrify]

Yep, this kind of all-encompassing approach does have some negative connotations, not the least of which is getting all of your information from one (corporate/non-public) source. I almost called it 'innovation,' which it's not. It's just plain old 'initiative.'

Look at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave on Keyhole...

[mogrify]

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.