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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.
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.
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...
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?
That quote has a very interesting history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
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"..
Don't be evil goes out the windows once you start having IPO's and you stock increases in value exponentially. Then the motto becomes, stay the course.
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.
Evil, n: Things we choose not to do.
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.