Monthly Archives: November 2018

Run Opera? How to unpluck your search-engine results

28 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Ooops!, Spotted in the news

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Has your ad-blocker (and other scripts) stopped working in the Opera Web browser today? It’s nothing to do with changes made by Google, Bing, Yandex etc.

What’s happened is that Opera has high-handedly decided to disable all adblocker and script-blocker addons from running on search-engine results pages. Thankfully, for now, the browser still has an option to turn off this unwanted and highly dangerous stupidity (disabling script-blockers etc) from the owners of Opera. Here’s the fix…

“For some reason Opera with the latest update have decided to add a new option for extensions that will disable them by default for “search page results”. You’ll have to go to top bar > Menu > Extensions > and then scroll down and tick the box “Allow access to search page results” for your addons. After that it will work normally again.”

You need to do this for each addon that affects search engines and their results, for example…

If you have a JURN link on your Google Search menu bar, via my UserScript, to get it back make sure to also enable TamperMonkey for Opera…

Added to OpenEco

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in My general observations

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Four historic journal archives at Cornell, added to the openEco directory… but they can’t be indexed by JURN.

Journal of Mycology (can’t be indexed by JURN, but noted here)

Transactions of the American Entomological Society (can’t be indexed by JURN, but noted here)

American Bee Journal and American Bee Journal 1861-1900 at the Cornell Online Beekeeping Collection (can’t be indexed by JURN, but noted here)

Annals of the Entomological Society of America (can’t be indexed by JURN, but noted here)

Someone might want to get these onto Archive.org in a more indexable form.

Google and Archive.org indexing

18 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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It appears that Google Search doesn’t track the Internet Archive (Archive.org) in anything like real-time for the useful content. For instance, see:

site:archive.org staffordshire -cannock -bbc

On this search you have to go to “Last year” to get anything useful from Google Search. With September 2018 being the latest datestamp I can see among those results. This gives the appearance that Google is only indexing Archive.org on a quarterly or bi-monthly basis?

Yet a search for…

site:archive.org + the ‘last week’

… does pick up material from Archive.org, but by the looks of it it’s only the utter rubbish, sex fantasies and spam that Google will want to rapidly exclude or make effectively undiscoverable. My guess is that there’s an ongoing low-level indexing of the new material purely in order to identify the junk, expose it to some user selection to try to sift out anything that’s a false-positive, and that this is then fed in as an ‘exclude’ junk-list for each larger quarterly re-indexing.

Error rates for Google Scholar citation parsing

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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Another new prodding of Google Scholar, this time from the latest First Monday “Testing Google Scholar bibliographic data: Estimating error rates for Google Scholar citation parsing”…

While data quality is good for journal articles and conference proceedings, books and edited collections are often wrongly described or have incomplete data. We identify a particular problem with material from online repositories [where there appears to be] considerable inhomogeneity in the implementation of data standards [and] a mismatch between repository software and the harvesting protocols employed by Google Scholar.

One of Scholar’s other problems is that it includes Google Books results. While 30% of the time its Google Books inclusions can useful, there is no way to exclude Books results. One might want to exclude because Scholar still can’t seem to determine a proper book from a robot-produced shovelware ebook that assembles public-domain content. Scholar has no ‘edition authority’ which states that the Joshi-edited and annotated Penguin Classics edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dexter Ward” is the gold-standard and that it has a text that has been fully corrected of the many textual errors, omissions and editing mistakes of previous decades. Unlike the public-domain shovelware ebooks that flood Amazon and (often) Google Books.

A basic undergraduate level search, for instance, for Lovecraft “Dexter Ward”, demonstrates the problem on the first page. Joshi is nowhere to be seen, and the searcher is hammered by links to shovelware ebooks (or worse), often with citation counts that suggest they are legitimate.

Added to JURN

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in New titles added to JURN

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Textile & Leather Review

Journal of Danubian Studies and Research (Regional Studies – The Danube)

Space Settlement Journal (National Space Society)

Digital Narratives of Asia (oral history / interview series)

Folia Orientalia (linguistics)

Linguistica Silesiana (linguistics)

Rocznik Orientalistyczny / Yearbook of Oriental Studies

Biodiversidade Brasileira (Brazilian nature conservation. Partially in English)

Revista CEPSUL – Biodiversidade e Conservacao Marinha (Marine nature conservation, Brazil. Partially in English)

Google Scholar at 389 million

14 Wednesday Nov 2018

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Michael Gusenbauer, “Google Scholar to overshadow them all? Comparing the sizes of 12 academic search engines and bibliographic databases”, Scientometrics, November 2018.

The findings provide first-time size estimates of ProQuest and EBSCOHost and indicate that Google Scholar’s size might have been underestimated so far by more than 50%. By our estimation Google Scholar, with 389 million records, is currently the most comprehensive academic search engine.

With the later proviso that there are likely to be many duplicates and near-duplicates, with such tools reporting…

the number of all indexed records on a database, not the number of unique records indexed. This means duplicates, incorrect links, or incorrectly indexed records are all included in the size metrics provided by ASEBDs.

As you can see, the article coins the ugly and unreadable “ASEBDs” for “academic search engines and bibliographic databases”. MASTs might be more mellifluous — Massive Academic Search Tools.

Block autosuggestions from the Google Scholar search box

05 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

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For those who know what they’re looking for, and how to type… here’s how to block the dumb auto-suggestions from appearing on the Google Scholar search-box:

1. In the UBlock Origin Web browser addon, open the My Filters list (Go: Icon | Slider Controls Icon | My filters tab).

2. Paste in the line…

google.*##[class^="gs_md_"]

3. Save the List and exit it. Reload Google Scholar, and the flickery and distracting (and almost always very wrong) drop-down suggestions are gone.

A variant of the above ‘block line’ with probably also work in similarly advanced ad-blocker addons.

News you can lose…

03 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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It looks like stories from U.S. news outlets, those that blank UK and European visitors, are now simply being removed from the Google News results. Spotted today, under the Google News results…

Annoying for those inclined to turn on their VPN and see the news story regardless. But, in practice, the publications still blocking overseas visitors are such low-grade regional newspapers that it’s no loss.

Clips and flicks

03 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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All U.S. film-makers can now crack anti-copying technologies on content ($ paywalled at law.com), if they need that content for ‘fair use’ use in a new production…

“Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemptions aren’t just for documentary filmmakers any more. The U.S. Copyright Office and Library of Congress last week broadened a DMCA exception to now allow more filmmakers to circumvent anti-copying technology and rip short video clips for purposes of commentary and criticism.”

However, it isn’t a free-for-all. Note that the PDF for the rules states that this new measure is specifically for…

“where the clip is used for parody or its biographical or historically significant nature”.

In a drama movie, the “commentary and criticism” would thus presumably be seen to be implied by the nature of the scene, rather than done in a directly academic or journalistic manner. For instance, I can imagine a dramatised scene of dancing on the beach as the Apollo 11 rocket lifts off behind the dancers. This scene would be a sort of implied commentary on the optimism engendered in the nation by the historically significant moment of sending men to the Moon. And if the high-res source needed for that was only available from Time-Life rather than NASA, then their Blu-ray disc could be cracked and a clip used as the background in the composite. Actually these days it’s probably easier to do it with 3D models and copy of Vue, but some may want the original footage — and historical personages can’t simply be conjured up in the same way.

Also, as the word “clip” is used and video is assumed in the PDF’s text, that leaves hazy the cracking of content protection to obtain a high-res still picture. A film-maker might need such a still for a Ken Burns “pan and scan” type film, and could perhaps argue that the still was required as a irreplaceable source needed to make the film’s video “clip”. But that’s probably something to be clarified in a future round of rule changes.