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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 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.
It is also short sighted of Google. If sites that Google is data mining go out of business, Google's users are worse off than they were before as the information Google will provide will be out of date and wrong.
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.)
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 he doesn't feel like suing then he should troll. Detect when Google is scraping and feed them a long string of hilariously-fake data. Celebrities who come up as broke. Celebrities who come up so rich that they need exponential notation. Celebrities with exponential negative numbers in their assets. Celebrities whose net worths are mathematical or physical constants. And of course, don't just list your friends as fake celebrities - list popular search terms as celebrities, even if they're not people.
Bonus points if you can redirect nicknames to real names. If so, then you can redirect celebrity names to whatever plaintext message you want to send. Aka "Tom Hanks" as a nickname for "Google is stealing my data" or whatnot.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
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"..
Citation
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wel...
Facts can't be copyrighted. Fake data can. Inject some fake data and then sue for copyright infringement. This is how mapmakers have always done it - add fake streets to nowhere and then sue when it shows up on another map.
This isn't enough in the US, see Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. Rural had fake listings that were copied, but still lost their claim.