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Google Rival Yelp Claims Search Giant Broke Promise Made to Regulators (wsj.com)
Online-reviews firm Yelp alleged that Google is breaking a promise it made as part of a 2012 regulatory settlement to not scrape content from certain third-party sites including Yelp, escalating its yearslong battle against the search giant. Yelp said in a letter late Sunday to Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen that Google is using Yelp photos for local-business listings in its search results, despite Yelp's formal request that Google not pull such content from its site. From a report: As part of a December 2012 settlement to end an FTC investigation into Google, the tech giant agreed to not use content, including photos and user reviews, from third-party sites that opted out of such scraping. Google's commitment lasts through 2017 and applies to a variety of its products, including its local-business listings. "This is a flagrant violation of Google's promises to the FTC, and the FTC should reopen the Google case immediately," said Luther Lowe, Yelp's public-policy chief. Yelp has emerged as a leading critic of Google because the site believes the search giant unfairly uses its influence to stifle competitors.
Hu? I see nothing in the yelp.com/robots.txt file which prevent google from accessing the site. Did I miss something someware?
I'm sure that this could all be worked out if Yelp just purchased some advertising space on Google.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Funny, actually sad, considering Google Corporate motto. Add Google trying to patent public domain technology,
https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...
1/2 of their revenue coming from the US Government & military, (aka, selling YOU the user out)
http://politicalblindspot.com/...
Google is just a company, like most corporations today. There is little concern about people, it's all about profit. If people get hurt, so what as long as investors get a return.
Same topic from a non-paywalled site. For the four /. readers that read the summary and the article.
Or have people who uploaded those photos to Yelp also uploaded them to Google? I've noticed Google Maps has been pretty aggressive lately asking for photos of places I've visited. Considering Yelp doesn't pay their contributors, it's reasonable to assume contributors are very altruistic people who will honor Google's request and upload their photos there too.
Yelp must be complaining because it knows its days are numbered. If the 2012 agreement only lasts through 2017, then what happens in a few months? Google will steal *ALL* of Yelp's assets, and probably introduce their own product to put Yelp out of business.
simple solution - can we just scrape Yelp?
Website known for behaving unethically complains (legitimately) about other website behaving unethically.
#DeleteChrome
Eventually a smartphone/device/whatever will come along and whack Google over the head. This type of change none of us see coming until it happens.
You mean like the iPhone did in 2007?
No real surprise from google, that they think "What's mine is mine, and what's yours we can talk about"
Who is Alexis?
The TL;DR version: you cannot wait for the current evil corporate overlord to be replaced by another (probably worse) evil corporate overlord.
Who do I root for? This is like having to choose whether to live next door to a child molester or a telemarketer.
How this will potentially happen, with contributions from the participants:
Samsung: The phone itself, the operating system, position as the top smartphone manufacturer
Microsoft: Office and related software, connections to enterprise industry, the existing vendor lock-ins they have created
Amazon: Superior logistics, banning competing devices or making them cost more, especially if they manage to get into a near-monopoly in the future
This has the potential for killing Google and replacing it with something that is vastly worse, even for non-technical end users.
It sucks your music got 'stolen', however, if you publish something on the internet, and this is true for anything published on the internet (as for anyone available without a restriction to authenticate), consider, by default, it will be handled as if in the public domain. Everyone can do whatever they like to do with it. This includes Google. This is because the internet is an open medium and if you want restrictions, you have to implement those yourself. You can't expect someone else to do that for you (unless you pay them or otherwise incentivize them). And you can't expect to just post something on the internet and then others magically not using it if it doesn't fit your wishes, but do use it if it does.
If you don't want your content to be used by everyone, and I expect you want to, else you wouldn't have bothered to post, there are a few simple steps to take.
In case of 'normal' users you can do various things. For example, use authentication mechanisms (a site login?) to prevent unauthorized access. This also prevents automatic scrapers, like search engines from taking your content, unless you explicitly allow them or your authentication mechanism is crappy and easily circumvented (in which case you have a lousy webdeveloper). Urge your users to not copy your work and publish it on other websites (and if they will, urge your rights representative to act on your behalf or send out DMCA requests to prevent linking to these illegal copies).
In case of search engines and other automatic scrapers, set your robots.txt appropriately. On my sites, as far as I know, robots.txt is honoured pretty well by the 'usual' search engines. I do sometimes see scrapers of questionable origins in the webserver logs. Those I just IP-ban. Nothing else can be done about that...
If you have done these things and your music is still being copied by Google/Bing/etc. then you have a point. By the way, copying and deep-linking are two entirely different beasts altogether. If you don't want to be deep-linked that's a wholly different story and another can of worms if that's considered EVIL or not. For example, most news paper publishers seem to HATE citation-and-deep-linking with a vengeance because they fear loss of advertisement revenue. But they still want to be found on the entire contents of their articles... In my opinion that's a have a cake and eat it situation... You can't force a search engine to both make your articles searchable but then withhold the searcher a proper link, so they have to navigate through your advertisements/payment model to eventually be able to reach the article they searched for. It's either good searchability 'for free' (in quotes because, of course, the search engines have their own business model, else they wouldn't exist at all) and 'free' content for the searchers or provide your own searcher (and do your own promotion to attract a public) and have a pay/advertisement-wall you can generate revenue from.
Also, since when did Yelp become a 'Google rival'? I can understand that said about Bing or DuckDuckGo or Apple, but Yelp!? Nah!
She sounds hot. I wonder if she likes bareback.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...stop a giant evil snowball from rolling over your village?
I'll throw in hot sauce as a starter.
Requiem for the American Dream
Nice rant. Too bad its completely wrong. Just because we treat everything on the internet as public domain doesn't mean it IS public domain. The only reason you and I don't get sued for copyright infringement is because we're too small to matter -- even the recording industry has kind of backed off suing thousands of John Doe's at a time because its too futile to warrant the bad PR and are focusing more on things like torrent sites (which is also pretty futile but at least they can name some defendants and try to win at whack-a-mole rather than hoping the entire country will happily give up our privacy for their benefit. At least when we give up our privacy to Facebook we get a social media site to use. When we give it up to the government we get some security theater to make us feel warm and fuzzy.
Giving it up to the RIAA gets us nothing.)
Google however is not too small to go after. So they get targeted when they do wrong, and rightfully so. So far their indexing has been mostly ruled under fair use, with some restrictions on the size of the snippits they can use in their results view and things like that. Its not really clear how, or if, that kind of "snippit" logic will apply to images since its not anywhere near as easy to identify a representative chunk of an image in the same way that you can identify sentence structure and grab the first paragraph of a block of text or the first 10 seconds of a video or the 113th page of a book or whatever.
I would have more respect for Yelp's complaint if they just blocked Google and other monopolies altogether. They however exclusively only allow Google and other monopolies to crawl their site while blocking everyone else. Talk about hypocrisy.
Look at their robots.txt file. They only allow monopolies to crawl their site and for everyone else there is this big FU:
User-Agent: * /
Disallow:
I and others have dealt with them directly on this to get this changed for text but no luck.
and see clearly that we live in 1984.
I wish the best for the human species. Yet, I have no faith.
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