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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.
Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.
Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.
Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave...
I am old enough to remember the USENET that is forgotten, though I was very young. Unlike the first Internet that died so long ago in the Eternal September, in these days there is always some way to delete unwanted content. We can thank spam for that—so egregious that no one defends it, so prolific that no one can just ignore it, there must be a banhammer somewhere.
But when the fools begin their invasion, some communities think themselves too good to use their banhammer for—gasp!—censorship.
After all—anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter, and students fear their professors' grading, and heaven forbid the janitors should speak up in the middle of a colloquium.
It is easy to be naive about the evils of censorship when you already live in a carefully kept garden. Just like it is easy to be naive about the universal virtue of unconditional nonviolent pacifism, when your country already has armed soldiers on the borders, and your city already has police. It costs you nothing to be righteous, so long as the police stay on their jobs.
The thing about online communities, though, is that you can't rely on the police ignoring you and staying on the job; the community actually pays the price of its virtuousness.
In the beginning, while the community is still thriving, censorship seems like a terrible and unnecessary imposition. Things are still going fine. It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Perhaps the fool will give up and go away, without any need of censorship. And if the whole community has become just that much less fun to be a part of... mere fun doesn't seem like a good justification for (gasp!) censorship, any more than disliking someone's looks seems like a good reason to punch them in the nose.
(But joining a community is a strictly voluntary process, and if prospective new members don't like your looks, they won't join in the first place.)
And after all—who will be the censor? Who can possibly be trusted with such power?
Quite a lot of people, probably, in any well-kept garden. But if the garden is even a little divided within itself —if there are factions—if there are people who hang out in the community despite not much trusting the moderator or whoever could potentially wield the banhammer—
(for such internal politics often seem like a matter of far greater import than mere invading barbarians)
—then trying to defend the community is typically depicted as a coup attempt. Who is this one who dares appoint themselves as judge and executioner? Do they think their ownership of the server means they own the people? Own our community? Do they think that control over the source code makes them a god?
I confess, for a
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.
Not if your business plan depends on Google being evil.
Google used to add value - they let you find what you needed to find. Now they're scraping sites and taking work product without recompense... though Google's probably far better at doing the same work with an in-house algorithm anyway.
The response to this is (so long as Google 'plays nice') is to restrict what your site gives to Google to teasers and only deliver your full site to actual visitors.
This might have been news in 2005. In 2017? Not so much.
Dog is my co-pilot.
How does this not qualify as theft? Seriously, this is google "doing evil" again. Wasn't there a policy against that? What happened there?
Where is the breakeven where they decide that the gain they receive is not worth the true cost externality of the cost they impose? At some point a government is going to look at the definition of externality, and even if google or whomever bought them, the politicians remember how much profit and political capital can be gained by attacking an evil empire, and the cost at that time is always engineered to be larger than the sum of all historic gains.
It is a long-term lose. They can mitigate the future cost now, by self-policing. Let's see if they have enough integrity, or even glutinous but not stupid self-interest, to do so.
A centralized source of information also means a fair bit of power/control over which information comes out. Couple this with the big push to protect the unwashed masses from 'fake news' and you have a pretty nasty result. No matter how good the initial intentions are, in the end, there's always an asshole (or a group of them) taking charge of that control.
Mind the frickin' laser...
"Do no evil"
AC comments get piped to
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.)
Slashdot does nearly the same thing. Often I find it pointless to go read the article itself after all that was given here.
If Google continues this behavior, web sites may shutdown. They need the clicks and the advertising revenue---in general.
Google could keep the "immediate answer" functionality while still supporting the sites that provide that information by splitting the ad revenue that Google received for delivering the results.
I believe the Featured Snippet is valuable to Google's users, and if the company is deriving a benefit from relaying that information then they can deal fairly with their sources.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I've noticed google does this with movies now. Search for a movie and you get the IMDB score in the search results. The only other reason I used to go to IMDB aside from looking at a movie's score was to look at (or ask a question in) the message boards. That feature is now gone. Are IMDB's days numbered?
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"..
The website displays the net worth as text. Would displaying it as an image fix the problem?
Good thing we have you to tell us what content we should and shouldn't consume. Otherwise civilization would surely crumble...Thanks Ricky boy !
One mans trash is another mans treasure.
Why do you get to be :the gatekeeper?
As someone above pointed out, a collection of facts doesn't fall under copyright. Of course IANAL, so I can't say this falls under that with any legal certainty, but it's not so simple.
Information have no wants and while information (as a concept) can't be stolen this article wasn't about stealing information.
Google is plainly using data from his site, that is copyright infringement plain and simple.
That's the definition of a search engine.
This whole so-called 'news story' about Google is blatant clickbait. How much are they paying you to post this, Slashdot?
This happens when there is a third party between a user and business. Google controls when and if the user gets to you. At one point it will take over your services and user will not even notice (actually they will be happy to receive faster answers in more unified way).
And that is only the beginning - with everybody jumping on voice inputs, AIs and such. At one point most of the internet sites providing information will be made obsolete because "order food" or "what is the ...?" will be answered/fulfilled right away by your phone or whatever device will use Google API or Apple API without any chance that the user will ever see the origin of the information or the service provider behind it...
It will be just a user-phone (Google, Apple, Samsung) interaction and somewhere on the backend there will be inter-changeable swarm of slave (businesses in very tough near perfect competition environment running on near 0-profit margins) service providers for big names owning the API gates. Dim future is ahead.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
The collection of facts is not copyrightable, of course.
But it's not JUST a collection of facts. Recall he put in the names of friends with false details. Those are not FACTS, they are FICTION and therefore under copyright, which Google is now violating on a massive scale.
Furthermore facts may not be copyrightable but exact wording is. As the copying of his friends shows Google appears to have copied his database wholesale, and offers proof that wording being the same is not a coincidence.
It is in fact very simple, he has clear and absolute proof that Google stole work product from him without paying. You don't need to be Perry Mason to extract money from Google under these circumstances.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's a difference between "should expect to" and "deserve to".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's really interesting, I had not heard that before and I'll admit it adds a lot of weight to the notion that a lawsuit would not get anywhere.
But I think the conclusion was incorrect and if a lawyer played it more as violation of copyright of non-facts, you could own a case today. Lastly, it also just adds more weight to the theory you should not sue for anything reasonable where the 9th circuit might be involved in the appeal...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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?
That's easy, Google. They already take the perspective that if you perform a search and the answer isn't available online, it's Google's problem and not the user's, so they've put substantial effort into collecting and curating data about things into their Knowledge Graph so they can present answers directly to the user.
Start living up to this, Alphabet,
Dog is my co-pilot.
So Google took the information directly from his site, then reposted it as their own, without attribution?
Remember, when he added fake data, Google started displaying that same fake data. That's not Google "showing quicker and easier" - that's Google stealing someone else's work to deliberately profit from it themselves.
Does anyone actually want to know how much celebrities are worth? And if so, why? It seems as pointless as gossiping about which kardashian is the fattest.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The GPL is constructed to work within the confines of copyright law because RMS was smart enough to know he couldn't kill the existing system so he might as well play along.
demanding companies to release GPL code, and using legal threats to infringe on peoples freedoms.
If you want the freedom to take other people's work and close the source and claim it as your own, go find a BSD license. The point of the GPL is to ensure the continued availability of the code to the community, not to provide free (as in beer) work for companies not willing to share.
And besides, if you don't redistribute your modifications you can do whatever you want with GPL'd code anyway.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
When I google a movie name and "rotten tomatoes", the snippet does not show the single most important piece of information: the score. Instead, you have to click into the page. I would bet Google intentionally decided to not show the score in their snippet, either through an agreement with Rotten Tomatoes, or because they didn't want to undercut the support of a great site.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Depending on your jurisdiction but tabular data or even quotes and snippets aren't typically falling under copyrighted materials.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Its not entirely hypocritical though, depending on how you want to phrase it. If you're looking at something like "copyright shouldn't be a thing" then sure, this seems a bit of a mixed bag.
But the more proper interpretation to pull would be "big guys shouldn't be allowed to shit all over little guys."
Napster doesn't really fall into that category. While some people disagree that copyright infringement should be illegal, few disagree that it is. And Napster was big enough to be not really be a "little guy" even though they were tiny compared to the RIAA.
I mean of course people were annoyed when Napster got shut down because free music is free and their service was far far better than any legal alternatives prior to iTunes, but its a rare person who would claim Napster wasn't in the wrong under the law, even if they don't agree with the law itself.
Google can show you quicker and easier
This is the sticky part. Google can't show it to you quicker or easier, except by pulling it from this guy's site. If that guy's site didn't exist (and presuming no equivalents are out there that Google could scrape instead,) then that information would be neither quick nor easy to obtain.
The whole "can't copyright facts" thing makes for a bit of a problem area for anyone who's trying to gather and curate facts -- their job is not zero worth and yet they can't claim any ownership over their work.
Not that I want to see copyright expanded (there's already far too much of that as it stands) but I definitely can see why people who do this kind of curation work would feel like they're getting the shaft.
Obviously somebody does, or that site wouldn't exist at all and we wouldn't be reading this article.
That said, the issue is far bigger than just the one site that happened to have a news story written about them. Google's quick boxes pull data from lots of sites and any of them that are relying on traffic from Google to survive will be having the same problem.
It's easy to detect google bots. Why not serve them something different?