Music and GooTube

Google has had somewhat of an odd relationship over the years to music information, and music information retrieval.  They’ve never really had a consistent policy, research, or product agenda around music.  The specifics of that history is too rich to recount in its entirety here; if readers are interested, perhaps that can be the subject of future blog entries.  Instead, I’ll pass along this little tidbid from the Read/Write Web blog.  It seems that a clever teenager had written a media player application that streams music directly from Google’s YouTube service, bypassing Google’s web pages.  Here is the jist of the controversy:

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Exploration and Explanation

Sometimes, the story is as good as the moral.  Sometimes, the journey is as good as the destination.  So in Information Retrieval, why are we too often satisfied with producing results, but not with explaining how the results were arrived at?

Daniel Tunkelang talks a lot about the need for transparency in search, in [...]