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Google's Featured Snippets Are Damaging To Small Businesses that Depend On Search Traffic (theoutline.com)
The Outline tells the story of CelebrityNetWorth.com, a website launched in 2008 that tells you how much a celebrity is worth. The site was an instant success, but things have turned sore in the last two years. The creator of the website Brian Warner blames Google for it. From the article: For most of its history, Google was like a librarian. You asked a question, and it guided you to the section of the web where you might find the answer. But over the past five years, Google has been experimenting with being an oracle. Type in a question, and you might see a box at the top of the search results page with the answer in large bold type. [...] In 2014, Warner received an email from Google asking if he would be interested in giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge Graph, for free. He said no, as he feared the traffic would plummet. [...] In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did. "Our traffic immediately crumbled," Warner said. He acknowledged the risks in building a site that depends so heavily on Google for search traffic, and whose research can easily be reduced to a single number. But he still thinks what Google did is unfair.
Google was wrong to scrape his data without his permission On the other hand, it's the market at work. Google can provide the answer more cheaply and in a better format that appeals to most users. He should probably accept that the world has moved on and he needs to provide a product that's still compelling. Technology changes putting someone out of business is news so old it's written in stone.
The only news here is that Google scraped his data without his permission and used it for business purposes. That's IP theft, and he should sue. If Google can't generate the data by themselves or by acquiring it legally, then their product is not inherently superior.
What does it matter if Google is taking your traffic anyway?
academia was around for decades before this generation started its ridiculous LARP.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
They were trying to monetize access to basic data and got under cut by a competitor who did it cheaper and more customer friendly. If your webtraffic can be decimated by customers receiving a one sentence answer to their question the problem may have been your business model, not Google.
There's a very flawed assumption here, which is that "basic data" and "one sentence answers" are always inherently easy to gather, and there's no significant time or monetary investment needed to do so.
That's obviously false. There's loads of non-trivial data out there which isn't available in something like a free government database or Wikipedia or whatever. It may take significant effort or resources to gather that data. I have no idea how much effort this particular site put into its data gathering, but clearly if Google is using it as a primary source for its "snippets," it must either not be available easily elsewhere for free or other sources are less reliable.
Thus, the site is apparently providing some value by gathering information that others don't.
Whether this can be turned into a viable business model is of course a separate question, but acting like Google is blameless by just TAKING that data and reusing it without permission is -- well, Google is certainly morally suspect at a minimum here. If businesses like this can't make money gathering such data, who will gather the data?
(Note that I really don't care about celebrity net worth, so I really couldn't care less if this data went ungathered. But the model applies to lots of other potentially useful information.)
Couldn't happen to a nicer site. They stole that data and took it private anyway - I was contributing to that in good faith when it was still a community project driven from Cardiff University. An early lesson for me, and one I've not forgotten.
See also Gracenotes for CD track listings.
If this celebrity net worth data is a common fact, then Google can do whatever it wants. Databases of common facts (e.g. info from a phone book) cannot be copyrighted. Just because you created a database of common facts doesn't mean you suddenly own those facts and that nobody else can use them without your permission.
OTOH, if their celebrity net worth figure is calculated based on their research combined with some proprietary algorithm, Google is in violation of their copyright. They can simply send Google a cease and desist letter and Google will have to pull it off their snippets (or license it from them).
OTOH, if Google has basically done what they did except using a new algorithm Google developed on its own, then they're SOL. They can't even argue that Google stole the idea from them because even if they didn't exist, Google would've created the algorithm based on the large number of search queries they got for a celebrity's net worth. Based on the sequence of events described in the summary, it sounds like this is what happened.
Moral of the story: If you want to make a successful website, make it based on something deeper than a simple factoid which can easily be recreated and expressed in a single sentence. Google is an excellent way of driving traffic to you, unless what you offer is so small that people won't bother clicking a link for "the full picture"..