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Google’s Featured Snippets are often wrong, and also damaging to businesses
- erickj 9y agoit seems like the better question is: "is it a good idea to build a business around trivia answers?" if your entire business model could be upended by a collection of 1 line wikipedia edits, then it seems like the problem is in the inability to forecast.
- hyperpape 9y agoI don't know how credible celebrity net worth is, but Wikipedia can't provide the best estimates. It doesn't have the organizational structure to ensure that they're present for all celebrities, or that they stay up to date, and its policy on citations means it can't engage in well informed speculation. The best Wikipedia could do is (manually or automatically) scrape a site like celebrity net worth for information, linking to its estimates, if wikipedia editors decided that it was a notable/reputable source.
- r3bl 9y agoYou need to get that data from somewhere in order for it to appear to Wikipedia. You need to analyze it. And Wikipedia would give you credit if you do the analysis yourself.
- tyingq 9y agoThat's one space that Google is gobbling up with this sort of thing. It's not the only one. Try: status flight 111 american airlines That used to result in a visit to aa.com Now they are way below the fold at around #6 or so. Google isn't planning just to eat up traffic for trivia sites.
- bpicolo 9y agoThat looks to be a result of those flight radar sites doing heavy SEO for the terms vs aa.com =/
- tyingq 9y agoThat explains #6, but the "below the fold" is because Google injects their widget: http://imgur.com/a/tr5cs http://imgur.com/a/tr5cs It's handy, sure. But it does take away a customer interaction that AA used to get.
- richardwhiuk 9y agohow is protecting AA's customer interactions Google's responsibility? from my perspective as a consumer, Google is providing the information I asked for, in a clear simple straightforward manner.
- tyingq 9y agoDidn't say it was. What I was getting at is that as a website owner, you aren't safe from Google taking away your traffic, solely by focusing on things that aren't trivia. You seem to agree.
- ominous 9y agoNo, from your perspective as a consumer Google is making it harder to go to the source. And if you learn to trust the snippets, Google is making it pointless for sources to cater to customers, rather than to please Google. Then you will just talk to Google, the gatekeeper.
- mytherin 9y agoIt isn't, but it is Google's responsibility not to infringe on the copyright of other people/companies. Google is not displaying their own content in those snippets. They are taking content from other websites, reformatting it and putting it on their own website. By stealing that content and displaying it to the user, the user now no longer needs to visit the website from which the content originated. They are directly taking away potential customers/revenue from these companies. It seems pretty clear that that's not entirely kosher.
- tyingq 9y ago
- gdulli 9y agoIf a business that carefully curates and delivers quality data can be replaced by an algorithm that delivers incorrect data, the problem from society's point of view is on a whole different plane than forecasting.
- AznHisoka 9y ago"I one-hundred-percent think we should be credited for them." But in the Floyd Mayweather example, his site is mentioned in the blurb so in a way he is credited with it. If he doesnt want to be in the snippet, then tell bankrate and every site that mention you to take down that mention. if he doesnt want his site to be linked to from any snippet, just add Google to your robots.txt dont want to do any of the above? ah... now we see he doesnt really have a legitimate complaint.
- phonon 9y agoWhat? The snippet mentions/links to bankrate. If you then go to bankrate, it credits celebritynetworth. Bankrate can list any sort of information they please--you can't tell a site not to mention/link to you.
- turc1656 9y agoYeah, the issue here is that he doesn't want to block Google from indexing his site because he wants to be ranked in the results, so he allows Google to display information that is on his site. He would have to disallow reproduction of his site's materials formally, or the much easier method of robots.txt that you mention. Ideally, he would do both. But he knows that will also kill traffic because then he's limited to other search providers like (gasp) Bing. This is all on him. Is what Google is doing shitty? Yeah. But at the same time it's almost insane that this guy knew his research could be boiled down to a single number (which is clearly displayed on his website) and his whole business model was getting Google traffic. You can't rely on an informal agreement with a titan of industry and expect to have any bargaining or negotiating power.
- sly010 9y agoThe examples in the article are all kind of acceptable, but I have asked google some very factual question (e.g. can covariance be negative) where it picked out the wrong answer from stack overflow that was clearly the opposite of the truth. It confused the hell out of me.
- tyingq 9y agoGoogle sometimes gives out pretty dangerous advice as well: http://imgur.com/a/bsP98 http://imgur.com/a/bsP98
- folli 9y agoThat's actually a really scary example.
- tyingq 9y agoIt's not the worst one. Here's one where absolutely NOTHING above the fold is a good idea. http://imgur.com/a/RXABg http://imgur.com/a/RXABg
- lordCarbonFiber 9y agoThat's a really interesting problem space, because what do you do when the foundation of the question is terrible, and yet, there exists plenty of information saying otherwise. What is even the ideal result from that query? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes I suppose.
- tyingq 9y agoI agree in terms of the organic results that come back. However, I don't see the logic in picking one of them and highlighting it. It has the appearance of an endorsement. I would also argue that the ads are deceptive for this query. Surely there's some AdWords policy about that?
- 9y ago
- xutopia 9y agoI remember the days when we all feared Microsoft in the startup world for the same reason we fear Google today.
- amorphid 9y agoI bet we'll fear Amazon's AWS in the future.
- josephorjoe 9y agoI'll definitely worry if they start writing good documentation.
- djsumdog 9y agoI stopped shopping at Amazon after returning to the US. They're pretty much the new Wal-Mart, except with mutant superpowers.
- amorphid 9y agoI've definitely cut back in Amazon shopping. There's too much garbage on the site. And it is nearly impossible to flag fraudulent items.
- Neliquat 9y agoI find 2/3 to be insultingly wrong. Example search: eye of round steak Result: Eye of round is irredeemable cut of meat. Wtf google.
- mbell 9y ago> Eye of round is irredeemable cut of meat. To be fair, that is actually fairly accurate.
- chrischen 9y agoTo be even more fair, I'm not getting that. I'm getting a Wikipedia excerpt.
- antsar 9y agoTo add a data point, I am. http://imgur.com/HNdTh4M http://imgur.com/HNdTh4M
- parenthephobia 9y agoGoogle US gives https://www.splendidtable.org/story/eye-of-round-is-one-of-the-few-unredeemable-cuts-of-meat https://www.splendidtable.org/story/eye-of-round-is-one-of-t... Google UK gives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_steak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_steak Possibly this is because in the UK (and presumably wherever you are) we don't call that cut "eye of round" (it seems to be from roughly the same part of the cow as our silverside), so we're googling to find out what it is, whilst in the US people are googling to find out how to cook it.
- dahart 9y ago> Featured Snippets usually have a note that says “About this result,” while Knowledge Graph answers do not. This seems like the potentially most interesting part to me. Excerpting data & web sites to build a service without citing the source or giving credit seems like it could be a copyright violation. The snippets case at least cites the source, and has a link to get you there, so even if it is damaging to a business it's probably legal. While copyright does have exceptions carved out for copying small snippets of a work, e.g., for educational purposes, there's no clear line for copying all of a work in thousands of tiny slices that are published separately. Seems like an area where copyright law is due for a change as a result of all things digital.
- ChicagoBoy11 9y agoIn the case of the celebrity net worth site, though, it seems pretty clear that he'd have a very thin case when it came to copyright. Just because it took them a lot of effort to come up with the numbers doesn't make the end result copyrightable - it is an estimation of a fact, and there is no copyright possibility there. Even if they took the whole thing, there is nothing non-obvious about a list of celebs and their estimated net worth. To me, that seems to have been the biggest problem in their particular business: they invested a lot of money into building something that it would be very hard to protect someone from just taking it once it is done.
- true_religion 9y agoIf your analysis is based on judgement calls and proprietary algorithms then the end result is copyrighted even if the end result is just a spreadsheet.
- c3o 9y agoI don't think that's true in the US – data/information isn't copyrightable, only original creative/intellectual works. A collection of data is still no original work. "Analysis based on algorithms" doesn't sound copyrightable either – only works by humans are covered. The EU, on the other hand, has a special copyright for databases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#Uni...
- Gigablah 9y agoAs discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139621
- tyingq 9y agoAlso related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885631
- caub 9y agowoa internet can be wrong? I didn't know
- gdulli 9y ago> At the time of writing, the [google] queries “Larry David net worth” and “how much is Larry David worth?” both turned up the answer $900 million and credited Business Insider > The Business Insider story says that “it has been estimated” that Larry David is worth up to $900 million [...] Then it cites CelebrityNetWorth’s lower number, $400 million, and quotes Larry David denying he was worth even $500 million The most valuable asset Google could possibly develop at this point is humility.
- 1_2__3 9y agoGoogle more than any other organization on the planet has bought at least some of its own bullshit. For at least 6-7 years they've been consistently, 100% sure that generally-useful AI (or something sufficiently approximately close) is just a few short years away, and thus any investment in anything else (like people) would be wasted. They've sacrificed countless customers, products and services on this altar, and will continue to do so probably indefinitely. They've decided they're going to live or die by the AI. Humans work there only to build, configure and maintain the machine. Every time I hear someone say "Google really needs to hire some <people>" or "Google needs to train their <people>" better I shake my head - it's like saying Ford should solve an efficiency problem with their cars by building boats. Google is not going to do that, ever, and Google is not going to learn humility either. They're convinced they have it figured out, reality be damned.
- Danylon 9y ago1. Google has been an AI company from the very beginning (information retrieval). 2. Google is investing and doing generally useful applied AI, not an AGI moonshot. 3. Google's AI researchers are not 100% sure that AGI is just a few short years away. 4. Major source of income is advertisements. A lot of non-technical people work on this, allowing others to do more research and improve search. 5. Like said, AI is Google's DNA from the start. They are the biggest AI company in the world, and will die/be dethroned when they let AI research wither. 6. Avoid blanket humility, and lose hunger, innovation, dare. "At Hooli, nothing is ever impossible".
- matthewbauer 9y ago
- joelrunyon 9y agoGoogle's "quality guidelines" prohibits scraping other sites and covering the first half of your site with ads. Google's results these days tend to scrape the information from most sites + list ads on >50% of the listings page. Really frustrating when Google doesn't even follow their own guidelines.
- Klathmon 9y agoThat's because those guidelines aren't meant for them. Google is saying that if you don't follow their guidelines, you "shouldn't" be included in their search results. They aren't saying you are committing some kind of atrocity, just that pages that do that provide bad results from searches. Of course google doesn't want scraped results showing up in their search results. Would you want your search engine to show results from other search engines which show results from other search engines which show results from a page with a snippet which points to the real source? They aren't "not following their own rules" any more than a train is braking the rules by being on the tracks in spite of the "stay off the train tracks" sign.
- tyingq 9y agoFrom Google's post about the "too many ads above the fold" update: "As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if...it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away"[1] So, they recognize pages that are heavy with ads at the top, which push down the actual content, aren't a good user experience. That's exactly what I get when I search Google...a bunch of ads or other self-serving stuff on top, that pushes down the content (actual organic results) that I'm looking for. [1]https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-...
- true_religion 9y agoTo me the ads are the content as well. Often times the tip search result is the same as the top advertisement.
- ape4 9y agoThe snippets aren't in the spirit of the web. The take traffic away from independent sites.
- darpa_escapee 9y agoIt keeps you in the Google silo, so it's in the spirit of Google.
- marcosdumay 9y agoIf Google starts believing their goal is to keep people on their site, they'll have a nasty surprise when people don't want to live it by clicking on ads.
- bhartzer 9y agoYes, they may not be in the spirit of the web. But if you have ever had a featured snippet (or earned one), you'll know that they actually bring a lot more traffic to your site. They hardly take away traffic from sites, as people are saying. That's just flat-out wrong.
- sushisource 9y agoExcept for the subject of the article who lost 65% of his traffic...
- cronjobber 9y ago> “But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.” The only question remaining for me is why Googlers still enjoy the respect of their peers. It was fine in 2000, nobody knew how it would turn out. Today, we need to start disrespecting the kind of person that would still work for that company.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoTo be fair, and I was considering placing this as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14157988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14157988 Google has incredible PR/marketing. And this isn't just a public-facing engagement. Google seems to do an incredible amount of inward marketing. The same high quality rhetoric that sells a large amount of the public on the notion that Google is a good company trying to make the world a better place works even better on Googlers themselves. Bear in mind, Googlers are provided food and amenities on campus, which keep them surrounded by the Google mindset most of the time. One of the funniest things recently, on another site, was getting a response from someone condemning my post about pay equality by a "Googler with a Googler wife". Many Googlers friends and family are also Googlers... that's where they spend all of their time. So there are plenty of people at Google whose entire social circle comprises of other Googlers. And that's before you talk about the fact that Google is paying them to be there. That's a huge amount of social pressure, and a huge amount of bias in what information they take in and how they interpret it. If their entire social and financial structure is built around a single entity, I suspect it'd be fairly difficult for the ordinary person in such a situation to leave. I don't fault individual Googlers for the direction of the machine. A movie called The Circle comes out in eight days, and I suspect it will be quite worthwhile on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlr8Am4zQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlr8Am4zQ0
- gjm11 9y agoHere's a lovely snippet-box example I encountered just the other day (and reported to Google; nothing's changed yet). Search for "tintinnabulum". (Advance warning: You might want to avoid doing this at work or in a public place.) The box at the top contains two things. 1. Some text from the Wikipedia article, correctly informing you that a tintinnabulum is a small bell on a pole in a Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope. 2. An image of a sculpture whose title happens to be "Tintinnabulum". The sculpture is of a naked woman riding on a penis-with-legs. The penis has a penis of its own, too. (Regrettably this doesn't continue recursively.) I am fairly confident that nothing resembling that sculpture is to be found in any Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope.
- reneherse 9y agoThe answer is that many customs and words predate their use in Christian mythology, including the "Tintinnabulum" of ancient Rome.
- Klockan 9y agoFrom the wikipedia article: > A tintinnabulum often took the form of a bronze phallic figure or fascinum, a magico-religious phallus thought to ward off the evil eye and bring good fortune and prosperity. So those images are showing tintinnabulums as well.
- gjm11 9y agoInteresting. But note that that's from a different Wikipedia article from the one the box quotes from. The box quotes from the "Tintinnabulum" article, which talks about Roman Catholic churches; you're quoting from the "Tintinnabulum (Ancient Rome)" article, which talks about wind-chime-figurines with enormous penises. The photo would make a good accompaniment to the latter article but makes a very strange, er, bedfellow with the one actually quoted in the box. I wonder whether Wikipedia's "Tintinnabulum" article should be renamed "Tintinnabulum (Roman Catholicism)" or something, and "Tintinnabulum" just take you to the disambiguation page, or alternatively whether those two pages should be merged into an article about small bell-like things, with sections on Ancient Rome and Catholic basilicas. Either way, there'd be less likelihood of a hilarious mismatch between picture and text in the Google answer-box.
- bhartzer 9y agoFeatured snippets are just that--they've taken a snippet from websites and are displaying them at the top of the search results for certain queries. Google doesn't say that the information is correct--they do ask for feedback (there's a link to submit feedback). Featured Snippets are not damaging to businesses. In fact, I've seen businesses benefit greatly by getting a ton of more traffic by having them. They get more leads and sales, and more ecommerce conversions. If you’re trying to rank for the answer to a question like “What is Larry David’s Net Worth?”, and the answer literally is a dollar figure or a “quick answer”, then I have no problem with Google “stealing” your traffic. In fact, if the answer is “$125 billion”, and Google can give searchers that answer without having to go to your website, then sobeit. What do you expect that visitor to do anyway when they get to your site? They’ll leave. They’ll hit the back button. They’ll bounce, because your site is focused too much on short, quick answers. How about creating some real content, content that will make visitors stick on your website and view more than one page?
- amelius 9y agoThis doesn't justify Google scraping their database.
- bhartzer 9y agoI don't see this as scraping, actually. They're taking part of the content from a page and displaying it in their search results. They do that with the site's title tag and meta description tag. I would be more concerned about the Google cache (for scraping) rather than a Featured Snippet. Go ahead and get a featured snippet (or earn one) and you'll see the massive traffic increase and trust your site will get. If you're concerned about them scraping, really, then go ahead and just block Googlebot from indexing the site.
- Safety1stClyde 9y ago> Go ahead and get a featured snippet (or earn one) and you'll see the massive traffic increase and trust your site will get. According to the article which we are supposedly discussing, the site in question got its traffic reduced by half after the snippet was added to the Google search results.
- elsewhen 9y agoi get the sense that google wants the featured snippets feature but are not devoting enough resources to it. the following featured snippet has been appearing for over 8 months, and i have sent feedback multiple times: https://www.google.com/search?q=apartments+for+rent+minneapolis https://www.google.com/search?q=apartments+for+rent+minneapo... the featured snippet is completely incomprehensible (and embarrassing)... they just don't seem to care enough.
- patmcguire 9y agoThey just scraped the first three days of the first three weeks of a calendar...
- elsewhen 9y agoexactly what a user wants who is looking for a list of available apartments </s>
- hiddencost 9y agoIf I were them I would vigorously avoid manually fixing individual cases that weren't dangerous? That's an extremely terrible way to build an NLP system.
- msoad 9y agoCan website put some sort of copyright clause that disallows Google from doing this?
- teej 9y agoYou can use: <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet"> https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en
- bhartzer 9y agoOr, you can use your robots.txt file and disallow Googlebot from crawling your site.
- che_shirecat 9y ago"Hey I have an infection in my fingernail, any advice?" "No sweat, just chop your arm off"
- Safety1stClyde 9y agoIf the business of your company involves Google advertising and getting hits on Google searches, it's a bad idea to completely block Google from indexing the site.
- bhartzer 9y agoIf your business model involves relying on Google for anything, then you need another business model.
- che_shirecat 9y agoHN elitism at its finest. Some people out there actually run their internet businesses to put food on the table, not just to stroke their techno-libertarian side-project erection
- 9y ago
- jefe_ 9y agoI get this, but in another sense, the answer is to offer people a reason to visit the site beyond the number, build an app with features people who care about celebrities' net-worth will enjoy, make something compelling so it's not as one-dimensional and easy to sidestep. It's like the whole 'keep american jobs' thing. I agree that American jobs are good, but many of the people calling for 'bringing back jobs,' aren't asking for new jobs with new technologies, efficiencies, and ways of doing things profitably, they want things to go back to 'the way they were,' and that really can't be done. Cut the losses try something new, keeping lessons learned.
- fiter 9y agoGoogle's offering isn't self-sustaining. These numbers will not be updated without the celebrity net worth company and Google will have to remove the outdated snippets. The celebrity net worth company started because no one was doing the leg work for the simple number. Your suggestion to the celebrity net worth company rings hollow after reading the article: the people Google to get the information and get the information at the top. Now there is no opportunity for the celebrity net worth company to offer a reason to visit the site! When the people had to visit the site, then there was a chance for the site to drive further engagement.
- awqrre 9y agoThe snippets are always wrong if you think about the ad revenue that Google steals and the copyright material that Google is using for profit. It sounds like a class action lawsuit could fix that.
- crispytx 9y agoSponsored Paul Graham's Net Worth Will Leave You Speechless
- dhatch387 9y agoThis amounts to copyright violation. CelebrityNetWorth went to great extent to organize this data and holds copyright on their site. Google is duplicating and redistributing this research without permission of the author.
- paulcole 9y agoquick! file for a DMCA takedown!
- tedivm 9y agoWhat's worse is that Google essentially uses its monopoly (or at least extreme popularity) on search to essentially extort people into going along with stuff like this. If the site in question actually filed a DMCA notice or requested a takedown in a more tactful manner (assuming he could actually find someone to talk to about it) Google would probably just tell them to update their robots.txt file so that the site doesn't show up on the search result pages.
- caust1c 9y agoI like to collect incorrect google cards: https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/659154907899936768 https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/659154907899936768 https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/811356518977138688 https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/811356518977138688 Edit: Today https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234 https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234
- hbcondo714 9y agoSearch software quality attributes in software engineering and Google will return a featured snippet from a 8-year old Microsoft site.