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> Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight

> Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. > When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.” Clever. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street. Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
See also: https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...
- CSMastermind 7y ago
  Buried at the bottom of that article is Bing's response explaining that they _do not_ in fact copy Google: https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279 https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-a...
aorav 7y ago
It’s indeed a lot more likely that LyricFind, from whom Google buys the content, scrapes the lyrics. Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them? I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.
- lowdose 7y ago
  WSJ had a focus on Google and NYTimes has Facebook in the crosshair.
cr0sh 7y ago
That is interesting; I did something like this decades ago for a former employer. To give an idea of the era, all the developers worked on green-screen dumb terminals (PCs were still a fairly expensive thing for a small business like this one - we had a few for training purposes, and our sysadmin had one - and that was about it; our main dev machine we hooked up to was a IBM RS/6000 workstation running AIX). In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then. It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

See also: https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...

CSMastermind 7y ago
Buried at the bottom of that article is Bing's response explaining that they _do not_ in fact copy Google: https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279 https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-a...

aorav 7y ago

It’s indeed a lot more likely that LyricFind, from whom Google buys the content, scrapes the lyrics. Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them? I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.

lowdose 7y ago
WSJ had a focus on Google and NYTimes has Facebook in the crosshair.

cr0sh 7y ago

That is interesting; I did something like this decades ago for a former employer. To give an idea of the era, all the developers worked on green-screen dumb terminals (PCs were still a fairly expensive thing for a small business like this one - we had a few for training purposes, and our sysadmin had one - and that was about it; our main dev machine we hooked up to was a IBM RS/6000 workstation running AIX). In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then. It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.