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As bad as this sounds, I got to say I'm not even mad. The instant answers Google provides seem to come from websites that are mostly unusable, bloated with trac

As bad as this sounds, I got to say I'm not even mad. The instant answers Google provides seem to come from websites that are mostly unusable, bloated with tracking and other BS that increase load times, and even worse SEO-content (that stuff that repeats words just to have more "relevant" keywords). I don't feel too bad about those pages losing traffic. Longform content, interactive content, blogs, videos, forums and social networks (generally pages you might want to spend more time on) seem to be mostly unaffected.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The issue you are missing is that the sites Google stole that information from often invested money in gathering it. The CelebrityNetWorth example: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... If Google kills CelebrityNetWorth's revenue, Google no longer can scrape updated data from CelebrityNetWorth, because they killed it already. So Google data gets worse or remains static, which quickly becomes inaccurate. The EU is attempting to fix this issue with the so-called "link tax" everyone has claimed is horrible for the Internet, but really, it's a way to correct the industry. For Google to have good information to scrape, the content creators need to be fairly compensated for that, or else the whole thing falls apart. Because right now, what Google has done, is acted as a parasite, but a poor one, that actually kills its host.
- cannedslime 7y ago
  Instead of an impossible to implement link tax, how about we just made it illegal for search engines to provide these kinds of "pirate" snippets without an opt-in... Either show meta desc, or don't show it at all. Adjust results by relevancy and pagerank (as they used to do) and everyone is happy.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    There's nothing impossible to implement about it, but the marketing from the opposition has been really strong. It isn't even a link tax, for example, but it's detractors have pretty successfully rebranded it.
    - cannedslime 7y ago
      No you are right, its going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience! I give you that link tax is misleading its more like a snippet tax, right?

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

The issue you are missing is that the sites Google stole that information from often invested money in gathering it. The CelebrityNetWorth example: https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... If Google kills CelebrityNetWorth's revenue, Google no longer can scrape updated data from CelebrityNetWorth, because they killed it already. So Google data gets worse or remains static, which quickly becomes inaccurate. The EU is attempting to fix this issue with the so-called "link tax" everyone has claimed is horrible for the Internet, but really, it's a way to correct the industry. For Google to have good information to scrape, the content creators need to be fairly compensated for that, or else the whole thing falls apart. Because right now, what Google has done, is acted as a parasite, but a poor one, that actually kills its host.

cannedslime 7y ago
Instead of an impossible to implement link tax, how about we just made it illegal for search engines to provide these kinds of "pirate" snippets without an opt-in... Either show meta desc, or don't show it at all. Adjust results by relevancy and pagerank (as they used to do) and everyone is happy.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  There's nothing impossible to implement about it, but the marketing from the opposition has been really strong. It isn't even a link tax, for example, but it's detractors have pretty successfully rebranded it.
  - cannedslime 7y ago
    No you are right, its going to be super easy, barely an inconvenience! I give you that link tax is misleading its more like a snippet tax, right?