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Google to stop showing news snippets for French users

256 points by tannhaeuser 7y ago

Kenji 7y ago
Is this the fallout of Article 13 we're starting to see?
pavelludiq 7y ago
Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed, the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.
- easytiger 7y ago
  This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.
- pteraspidomorph 7y ago
  There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.
- timwaagh 7y ago
  It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.
  - kozhevnikov 7y ago
    It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.
    - dahauns 7y ago
      But there already is? That's exactly what the nosnippet meta-tag is for.
    - zmix 7y ago
      It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.
  - realusername 7y ago
    They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.
  - zmix 7y ago
    > Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. They were! From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?
  - sbx320 7y ago
    Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again. The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue. I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.
    - amelius 7y ago
      But what was the effect for the consumer? Did they read less news? Was that a problem? Did they read other news? Did they visit more smaller news sites as opposed to a few large ones?
      - Krasnol 7y ago
        There was no effect on the consumer who uses google as the law was supposed to be installed August 1st 2013 but the main publishers who lobbied for the law granted google a free license 2 days before the deadline. As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license. It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end. The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again. I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort. A lose - lose for everybody.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?
  - Kiro 7y ago
    > and content creators get nothing? Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site. Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.
    - simias 7y ago
      In order to display ads Google needs users to use its websites. Google being able to offer news snippets on his website is a feature that drives traffic and therefore drives ad impressions and therefore revenue. It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money. I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.
      - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
        Those impressions are not from the search site but come into play once people click on a link. Google has an incentive to have people click on links. Including news sites. Especially news sites that come with tons of ads. Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money. I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  > Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.
    - elcomet 7y ago
      No. They wanted google to either pay or stop displaying snippets.
      - phoe-krk 7y ago
        No. They wanted Google to either pay or pay. They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
        eps 7y ago
        > Plummeting page views Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI. * Edited for clarity.
        phoe-krk 7y ago
        Could you link and/or clarify a little bit? Did their profits shrink by 20% to 80%, or by 80% to 20%?
- thunderbong 7y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.
- simias 7y ago
  Your reaction is over the top IMO. I'm quite perplex about this law myself but I think you're missing the point. You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations. I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done. >the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people. Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.
    - benologist 7y ago
      Would you rather they iterate towards a solution or have giant corporations calling the shots? They're just trying to fix Google's mess, like when they have to litigate to collect taxes or when the DOJ litigates to prevent colluding to depress employee wages or when customers litigate to collect their refunds. It's Google forcing new laws and litigation, the EU is much their victim as their employees, customers and users. https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-france-being-raided-for-unpaid-taxes https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-over-fraud-scheme-11558113251 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...
- jorvi 7y ago
  I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    It was Getty Images that sued Google. Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.
- lumberjack 7y ago
  Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.
- bsaul 7y ago
  I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      By a large portion do you mean virtually no real users? People are lazy.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        People will absolutely switch if another search engine is substantially better. But that's hard to do because Google isn't a lazy incumbent, their search is being continually worked on and improved. Mostly other search engines seem to try to compete based on privacy or something, and while that's nice, it's not as tangible as superior core search functionality. Like, DuckDuckGo isn't a bad search engine, and for a lot of things it seems about equally good. But "comparably good most of the time" doesn't make for a very compelling case to switch.
    - bsaul 7y ago
      There’s a reason why states have rules against monopolistic companies. Once a company reaches a critical mass in one sector, it becomes almost impossible to create competition, for many various reasons. But you’re right, old european countries really never tried to think seriously about what makes them lagging so much behind the US and China.
    - ativzzz 7y ago
      You underestimate how much higher this value proposition needs to be for people to switch, and you overestimate the amount of savvy web users.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- makomk 7y ago
  It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened. > No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)
  - pas 7y ago
    Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?
    - makomk 7y ago
      Supposedly there were enough MEPs who were opposed the copyright changes that they should've been able to block them (which is pretty remarkable and almost never happens), but due to the confusing way the vote was organised some MEPs "accidentally" pressed the wrong button and voted for it instead, causing it to be passed. It's not clear whether this was in fact an accident or just plausible deniability.
- buboard 7y ago
  Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best. There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
  - workaway 7y ago
    Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?
    - buboard 7y ago
      How is gnews “more options”. They dont write news, they aggregate
      - kansface 7y ago
        It’s aggregation that is the valuable part, not the news or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place and it would be newspapers that took over the world instead of google.
        buboard 7y ago
        Aggregation of a product that is devalued the more you aggregate it. Inevitably it kills the product and you have nothing to aggregate. Google is doing that (sucking up all the ad revenue) to all kinds of publishers and i expect to see more of this.
        pas 7y ago
        How is Google sucking up adrev.? Publishers get revenue from Google, or they can manage ad sales however they want. They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still. They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
- twirlock 7y ago
  >boohoo someone stopped google from piping propaganda directly to users' rectums
Traubenfuchs 7y ago
Users will have less incentive to click on links without a little preview. Publishers will scratch their head about numbers getting worse. Smart publishers will enable previews. Soon, everyone will enable previews. Well done!
- iMerNibor 7y ago
  > Soon, everyone will enable previews. Only on the big websites though, why would a news org bother with small or tiny news aggregators? The small websites will have to shut down while google will get even stronger. (This happened in germany already when they introduced a very similar law)
  - Traubenfuchs 7y ago
    I do not know about the technical details. Is it more effort than putting something in your robots.txt or putting a meta tag in your HTML?
    - ru999gol 7y ago
      That's not really the question, the news sites will give Google explicit permission to use their content while not granting the same usage rights to any other smaller EU-based search/news-aggregation service. That's why every single person who knows what they are talking about has warned about this law from the beginning, but they were all ignored. Now this deals incredible damage to the future of EU internet companies and helps established big US corps. Everyone knew that, its just business as usual with the corrupt to the core and incompetent EU.
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      Yes, this law requires an explicit agreement between each publisher and each aggregator to determine the price (probably 0 for Google) under which the snippets may be used. A much better law would have standardized a set of headers or meta tags, similar to what Google uses, to allow publishers to specify allowed usage and created penalties for aggregators that don't respect those headers.
rq1 7y ago
Almost there... just a small effort and Google News will look like Hacker News.
tastroder 7y ago
I really wish traditional news media, aka those people that are supposed to dissaminate the news, would get a grip and stop breaking the internet and their core business altogether one of these days. If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers. But no, instead of better content and easier ways to consume it, we get more clickbait and whining about fake news. At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time? Or is it an entire field of people being lazy and wanting easy money that caused it to go down the drain? There exist “journalists” that write clickbait and content that wastes time. There are also journalists that risk their life and limb to gather and disseminate important information for society. Clearly, it’s a difficult problem to address. The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. The journalists need a steady source of income to feed their families, and to incentivize people to become journalists. There’s a myriad of other issues as well, but it’s not a simple “the entire news media field is a bunch of bad actors”. They’re not paid well as it is, and I don’t see many people clamoring to take on the risks that real journalists do for the money they do it for, so there must be an issue on the revenue side as well.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    It’s really just a simple supply and demand curve. A certain number of people have a demand for particular publications at a price of $0, and a significantly smaller groups of people have a demand for those publications at any price greater than $0. > The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. This just sounds mightily smug to me. People like things that you don’t think they should like, but if only they were as educated as you are, they would share your correct tastes and world view?
chvid 7y ago
How the eu fights American big tech. Compare it with how China fights American big tech ...
mola 7y ago
Good, I believe media outlets will benefit, unless Google deliberately undermine their business model in some way. As a deterrent for others.
jeroenhd 7y ago
Reminds me of when news publishers tried to do the same in Germany and then lamented the drop in click through rate. Lobbyists for magazines and newspapers got the EU to put this law into effect and I'm glad they're going to be the ones who suffer the worst. If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  I agree with the gist of your comment, but: > If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect. Major scoops that require many man-months of digging can often be summarized in just a headline.
  - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
    Everything can be summarised in just a headline, including your or my life. But I doubt your life can be explained in just a thumbnail or headline.
  - smueller1234 7y ago
    Not in a useful way, I don't think. If that was the case and if it was a real problem, newspapers and magazines wouldn't want to be displayed at news agents either.
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    Based on the number of times I'm browsing HN (a community of smart, well read and educated individuals) and read a question that's answered by TFA I don't believe interesting content can be summarized in a headline. Especially when it comes to science journalism, distilling a new study and all its subtleties into a one liner often does more harm than good.
oaw-bct-ar-bamf 7y ago
I am in favour of this. If a site is doing the work of providing content (news, sport game scores, weather, ...) and Google passes by, scrapes the most important information and shows it on their own site, a large swath of users will never visit the content provider. The one providing the content has rights to his content.
- chmod775 7y ago
  I'm wondering whether you're also in favor of disallowing journalists to basically create blogspam copies of other, real journalist's, work? Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2 sentences with a link to the article? Not so much. As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending users their way.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    What do you mean by disallowing? Regulation is extremely specific for a reason. If it works, yea, that would substantially raise the quality of reporting. Google just seems trivially regulatable compared to “journalists”.
- jasonvorhe 7y ago
  There's robots.txt to prevent that and Google will respect that.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    That doesn’t give the consumer any power here. It should be trivial to disable this metadata scraping feature. It doesn’t improve results so why should i support this?
    - pas 7y ago
      Consumers have the power to stop using Google.
ifthenelseend 7y ago
EU is the nightmare for every startup with all that laws. No time to develop the product, because there is a lot of bureaucracy that take all your time.
- simion314 7y ago
  So Google should be allowed to grab your content and put it on their page - but if you make a video of yourself and put it on youtube and a car with the stereo appeared for a few seconds in it your video is claimed. It is like all the laws that make big companies money are good and the ones that make the same big companies less money are bad.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Hang on, the issue you have with copyright claims is made far worse by EU law..
    - simion314 7y ago
      How? who is affected negatively ? creators,publishers, the people in the short term or in the long term?
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Creators, long-term. EU argues we're giving creators new freedoms, but really, we're stripping the freedom to criticize, make parody and remix from all but the biggest corporations who can afford to pay the license fees. Fair use doesn't have a legal standing in the EU right now.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    Google is not the one issuing takedown requests on YouTube for music in the background. This whole concept of a small sample of something violating copyright IMHO is the death of culture, it's excessively injecting chilling effects and barriers into information sharing. We went through this in the 80s with Hip-Hop artists and sampling. I mean, if my son quotes a paragraph out of a French news website for a term paper, and that paper is published online, is it now a copyright violation? When does text summarization down to 2-3 sentences violate copyright? How far do we take this? The publishers business models are collapsing, but their foray into hyper monetization and litigiousness surrounding any use of what they publish, if anything, will only serve to speed up they're demise. We have to find alternate models to support local journalism, and this ain't gonna help.
xorcist 7y ago
This would have been a logical part of robots.txt from the beginning. Under an earlier Google this would probably not have been allowed to escalate this far.
theboulevardier 7y ago
Google has also started classifying non-news sites as being news sites and no removing snippets from them. I have already had to manually change the designation in the Google Search Console on a couple of sites that I look after this week after Google flagged them. I'd recommend that site owners check in the search console to see if they are affected.
buboard 7y ago
This is good. More clicks to the news sites and google is more like Reddit now. But it is sad that there had to be a law for that. Gooogle should give the option to remove anything but the title from the page result (is this possible?).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jhall1468 7y ago
  Less clicks. Much less. It's exactly what happened in Germany. They "won" and then saw their Google click-through rate plummet, which was a significant % of their click-throughs.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Less clicks through search for sure. This however may render google news useless, and increase direct traffic instead
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      Would a news stand being forced to cover all the newspapers in black bags drive more sales to online orders?
      - buboard 7y ago
        That s not what s happening. Paper Newspapers have a frontpage for a reason: only titles, not the content. If you want more, buy it
- Klathmon 7y ago
  Google already did give the option of publishers controlling the way their content shows in places like Google news, including multiple controls over if the snippets are shown, how much text can be shown, whether the google cached link should be shown, and more. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
lettergram 7y ago
After reading the comments (on HN) and the law I think this is a good thing. I’m rather confused by the visceral response by some people on HN. It may be an unpopular opinion, but Google was stealing. They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. What this means for content creators is that you couldn’t make revenue. If I search for something on Google I get so much information above the fold (and ads), I pretty much never see a real site. That’s a serious issue, because Google isn’t creating that content. Worse, their using their monopoly to push the AMP framework to make it easier to get snippets and actually serve your content on their servers. No, this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Almost all decent sized websites add their own preview and snippets (which Google can display). So all it does is enable further controls to publishers.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > They were showing enough information [that] no one was clicking the links. This is a testable claim. If snippets were preventing people from clicking the links, then publisher revenue should rise now that Google isn't showing any information. Now, keep in mind that every single time this experiment has been tried in Europe in the past, publisher revenues plummeted. But maybe this time will be different.
- sbx320 7y ago
  > They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the opposite seems to be true. Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80% drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.
  - lettergram 7y ago
    I mean, those claims are anecdotal at best and more importantly Google controls what people see, which is kind of my point. You can’t validate Google isn’t manipulating results. They have every incentive to manipulate them. I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?
nkkollaw 7y ago
Not that Google News is any good. My newsfeed is basically far-left propaganda. I would almost go as far as to say that this is a good thing for France.
remotecool 7y ago
This is why more countries need to break away from the EU.
skybrian 7y ago
I'm a bit confused by this because Google News has only been showing headlines since their last redesign. I guess they will stop showing images as well? I think that would be an improvement.
dghughes 7y ago
This reminds me of the daily posting on reddit in the GPDR subreddit. People are shocked that the countries outside the EU are not respecting the GPDR. Or more shocked that a website would rather not do bushiness with or block people in the EU from seeing their website. Most times a website put up bannersaying "yadda yadda cookies...privacy...agree/disagree?" and that's that.
OrgNet 7y ago
I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner and all over the world.
pkaye 7y ago
> The change means French users will only see the headlines and not the first few lines or a thumbnail image for news content unless European publishers specifically request to show previews, the company said. I'm guessing some publishers will give permissions and eventually forcing others to follow suit when they start losing traffic.
rendall 7y ago
Google is still a new phenomena, and we are still trying to come to terms with it as a society. It's the first global monopoly, and it's on information. Holy cow, that's just strange. I applaud the EU for at least attempting to grapple with the potential existential threat that Google represents, rather than rolling over and pretending nothing is wrong as the US does; or censoring, as China does. Even though I think the specific solution is probably unhelpful, it's much better than pretending that everything is as it should be, and crowing when newspapers get their "comeuppance" when Google punishes them by reducing their traffic.
- buboard 7y ago
  The US is not pretending; there is actually nothing wrong because googld is a US business. EU is following china here, building a covert great firewall in an attempt to resurrect local market. A little too late though
  - rendall 7y ago
    You didn't address the main point. So to expand on it, Google is effectively an information monopoly, which means that it uses its market dominance to restrict competition. Moreover, it also uses its position to influence the web and public opinion itself in ways for which there is no precedent. The US is not addressing this last aspect in any respect. Not sure what Google being an American company has to do with that.
riclad1 7y ago
This law is pointless , it was tried in germany and spain, result,google news closed down. google news provide a service , free , no ads. if a newspaper wants to get paid for links or snippets, it should expect that most websites will opt out. The result is less traffic to newspaper websites, see google reader, google plus etc no one can force google to provide a service, even if it has millions of users. If it does, not fit in google,s plans the service will disappear . IT WOULD Be disastrous if google actually paid for a snippet, IT,S , a slipperly slope, next thing is google will have to pay to link to Any european news or list them in the search results. Say i,m looking for news on brexit, i should not have to go to 30 different websites, going to google news is a much better option. The european newspaper companys remind me of of music companys in the 90,s , they were facing declining sales of cds, , music piracy, they launched apps or various mediocre incompatible music service,s with drm some of which only worked on phone,s or pc,s or various devices, and used various , It required steve jobs to appear and apple to invent the ipod and itunes , a simple service ,buy music, buy albums, ,1 song for 99 cents ,all music in mp3 format. Then streaming came along and the music industry is actually making more money every year as people get used to paying subscriptions for apple music, spotify etc The News industry needs a tech genius to come along who knows how the web works , what users want, what they will pay for , Maybe have a website, New,s .fr, news,germany.com, news,spain.com etc Where any news paper or blog can post links to news storys or any article. WIth ads if they want , Any news paper with a website can post on the website, it would be run by a semi independent board, so its not under the control of just one company .
andrerm 7y ago
How does Google rank pages with and without nosnippet?
Equanimous 7y ago
Websites do have enough possibilities to restrict legal access to their content. Google is respecting entries in robots.txt for search restrictions. If some media lobbyists are whining about Google not paying for their news snippets they talk about it like they are forced to show snippets from their site on Google but in fact, they are not. They just want to cash grab successful internet companies and initiate a smear campaign against them like it is done in several newspapers in Germany in the last few weeks.
Mozilz_spoofing 7y ago
Publishers have always been able to choose whether or not they want their content to be accessible through Google's search engine or Google News. We have just put in place more granular webmaster settings that allow publishers to specify how much information they want to appear as a preview in the search results. Publishers around the world can use these new settings to choose the type of preview best suited to attract users to their site. This just proves that it was all about making Google pay and not about control.

256 points by tannhaeuser 7y ago

Is this the fallout of Article 13 we're starting to see?

Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed, the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.

easytiger 7y ago
This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.
pteraspidomorph 7y ago
There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.
timwaagh 7y ago
It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.
- kozhevnikov 7y ago
  It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.
  - dahauns 7y ago
    But there already is? That's exactly what the nosnippet meta-tag is for.
  - zmix 7y ago
    It is already. And in addition to that, since 'robots.txt' is being considered to broad and too 'out of time', Google offers meta tags, that their bot evaluates. They did this long time before the EU direction.
- realusername 7y ago
  They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.
- zmix 7y ago
  > Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. They were! From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet"> max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.
kd5bjo 7y ago
We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?
- sbx320 7y ago
  Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again. The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue. I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.
  - amelius 7y ago
    But what was the effect for the consumer? Did they read less news? Was that a problem? Did they read other news? Did they visit more smaller news sites as opposed to a few large ones?
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      There was no effect on the consumer who uses google as the law was supposed to be installed August 1st 2013 but the main publishers who lobbied for the law granted google a free license 2 days before the deadline. As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license. It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end. The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again. I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort. A lose - lose for everybody.
tannhaeuser 7y ago
Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?
- Kiro 7y ago
  > and content creators get nothing? Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.
- AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
  Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site. Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.
  - simias 7y ago
    In order to display ads Google needs users to use its websites. Google being able to offer news snippets on his website is a feature that drives traffic and therefore drives ad impressions and therefore revenue. It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money. I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.
    - AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
      Those impressions are not from the search site but come into play once people click on a link. Google has an incentive to have people click on links. Including news sites. Especially news sites that come with tons of ads. Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money. I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
> Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.
  - elcomet 7y ago
    No. They wanted google to either pay or stop displaying snippets.
    - phoe-krk 7y ago
      No. They wanted Google to either pay or pay. They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
      - eps 7y ago
        > Plummeting page views Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI. * Edited for clarity.
        phoe-krk 7y ago
        Could you link and/or clarify a little bit? Did their profits shrink by 20% to 80%, or by 80% to 20%?
thunderbong 7y ago
I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.
simias 7y ago
Your reaction is over the top IMO. I'm quite perplex about this law myself but I think you're missing the point. You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations. I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done. >the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people. Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.
  - benologist 7y ago
    Would you rather they iterate towards a solution or have giant corporations calling the shots? They're just trying to fix Google's mess, like when they have to litigate to collect taxes or when the DOJ litigates to prevent colluding to depress employee wages or when customers litigate to collect their refunds. It's Google forcing new laws and litigation, the EU is much their victim as their employees, customers and users. https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-france-being-raided-for-unpaid-taxes https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-over-fraud-scheme-11558113251 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...
jorvi 7y ago
I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  It was Getty Images that sued Google. Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.
lumberjack 7y ago
Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.
bsaul 7y ago
I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire
- threatofrain 7y ago
  A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    By a large portion do you mean virtually no real users? People are lazy.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      People will absolutely switch if another search engine is substantially better. But that's hard to do because Google isn't a lazy incumbent, their search is being continually worked on and improved. Mostly other search engines seem to try to compete based on privacy or something, and while that's nice, it's not as tangible as superior core search functionality. Like, DuckDuckGo isn't a bad search engine, and for a lot of things it seems about equally good. But "comparably good most of the time" doesn't make for a very compelling case to switch.
  - bsaul 7y ago
    There’s a reason why states have rules against monopolistic companies. Once a company reaches a critical mass in one sector, it becomes almost impossible to create competition, for many various reasons. But you’re right, old european countries really never tried to think seriously about what makes them lagging so much behind the US and China.
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    You underestimate how much higher this value proposition needs to be for people to switch, and you overestimate the amount of savvy web users.
deleted 7y ago
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makomk 7y ago
It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400 No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened. > No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)
- pas 7y ago
  Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?
  - makomk 7y ago
    Supposedly there were enough MEPs who were opposed the copyright changes that they should've been able to block them (which is pretty remarkable and almost never happens), but due to the confusing way the vote was organised some MEPs "accidentally" pressed the wrong button and voted for it instead, causing it to be passed. It's not clear whether this was in fact an accident or just plausible deniability.
buboard 7y ago
Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best. There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
- workaway 7y ago
  Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?
  - buboard 7y ago
    How is gnews “more options”. They dont write news, they aggregate
    - kansface 7y ago
      It’s aggregation that is the valuable part, not the news or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place and it would be newspapers that took over the world instead of google.
      - buboard 7y ago
        Aggregation of a product that is devalued the more you aggregate it. Inevitably it kills the product and you have nothing to aggregate. Google is doing that (sucking up all the ad revenue) to all kinds of publishers and i expect to see more of this.
        pas 7y ago
        How is Google sucking up adrev.? Publishers get revenue from Google, or they can manage ad sales however they want. They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still. They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
twirlock 7y ago
>boohoo someone stopped google from piping propaganda directly to users' rectums

Traubenfuchs 7y ago

Users will have less incentive to click on links without a little preview. Publishers will scratch their head about numbers getting worse. Smart publishers will enable previews. Soon, everyone will enable previews. Well done!

iMerNibor 7y ago
> Soon, everyone will enable previews. Only on the big websites though, why would a news org bother with small or tiny news aggregators? The small websites will have to shut down while google will get even stronger. (This happened in germany already when they introduced a very similar law)
- Traubenfuchs 7y ago
  I do not know about the technical details. Is it more effort than putting something in your robots.txt or putting a meta tag in your HTML?
  - ru999gol 7y ago
    That's not really the question, the news sites will give Google explicit permission to use their content while not granting the same usage rights to any other smaller EU-based search/news-aggregation service. That's why every single person who knows what they are talking about has warned about this law from the beginning, but they were all ignored. Now this deals incredible damage to the future of EU internet companies and helps established big US corps. Everyone knew that, its just business as usual with the corrupt to the core and incompetent EU.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    Yes, this law requires an explicit agreement between each publisher and each aggregator to determine the price (probably 0 for Google) under which the snippets may be used. A much better law would have standardized a set of headers or meta tags, similar to what Google uses, to allow publishers to specify allowed usage and created penalties for aggregators that don't respect those headers.

rq1 7y ago

Almost there... just a small effort and Google News will look like Hacker News.

tastroder 7y ago

I really wish traditional news media, aka those people that are supposed to dissaminate the news, would get a grip and stop breaking the internet and their core business altogether one of these days. If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers. But no, instead of better content and easier ways to consume it, we get more clickbait and whining about fake news. At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time? Or is it an entire field of people being lazy and wanting easy money that caused it to go down the drain? There exist “journalists” that write clickbait and content that wastes time. There are also journalists that risk their life and limb to gather and disseminate important information for society. Clearly, it’s a difficult problem to address. The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. The journalists need a steady source of income to feed their families, and to incentivize people to become journalists. There’s a myriad of other issues as well, but it’s not a simple “the entire news media field is a bunch of bad actors”. They’re not paid well as it is, and I don’t see many people clamoring to take on the risks that real journalists do for the money they do it for, so there must be an issue on the revenue side as well.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  It’s really just a simple supply and demand curve. A certain number of people have a demand for particular publications at a price of $0, and a significantly smaller groups of people have a demand for those publications at any price greater than $0. > The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. This just sounds mightily smug to me. People like things that you don’t think they should like, but if only they were as educated as you are, they would share your correct tastes and world view?

chvid 7y ago

How the eu fights American big tech. Compare it with how China fights American big tech ...

mola 7y ago

Good, I believe media outlets will benefit, unless Google deliberately undermine their business model in some way. As a deterrent for others.

jeroenhd 7y ago

Reminds me of when news publishers tried to do the same in Germany and then lamented the drop in click through rate. Lobbyists for magazines and newspapers got the EU to put this law into effect and I'm glad they're going to be the ones who suffer the worst. If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.

skrebbel 7y ago
I agree with the gist of your comment, but: > If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect. Major scoops that require many man-months of digging can often be summarized in just a headline.
- AnonymousPlanet 7y ago
  Everything can be summarised in just a headline, including your or my life. But I doubt your life can be explained in just a thumbnail or headline.
- smueller1234 7y ago
  Not in a useful way, I don't think. If that was the case and if it was a real problem, newspapers and magazines wouldn't want to be displayed at news agents either.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Based on the number of times I'm browsing HN (a community of smart, well read and educated individuals) and read a question that's answered by TFA I don't believe interesting content can be summarized in a headline. Especially when it comes to science journalism, distilling a new study and all its subtleties into a one liner often does more harm than good.

oaw-bct-ar-bamf 7y ago

I am in favour of this. If a site is doing the work of providing content (news, sport game scores, weather, ...) and Google passes by, scrapes the most important information and shows it on their own site, a large swath of users will never visit the content provider. The one providing the content has rights to his content.

chmod775 7y ago
I'm wondering whether you're also in favor of disallowing journalists to basically create blogspam copies of other, real journalist's, work? Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2 sentences with a link to the article? Not so much. As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending users their way.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  What do you mean by disallowing? Regulation is extremely specific for a reason. If it works, yea, that would substantially raise the quality of reporting. Google just seems trivially regulatable compared to “journalists”.
jasonvorhe 7y ago
There's robots.txt to prevent that and Google will respect that.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  That doesn’t give the consumer any power here. It should be trivial to disable this metadata scraping feature. It doesn’t improve results so why should i support this?
  - pas 7y ago
    Consumers have the power to stop using Google.

ifthenelseend 7y ago

EU is the nightmare for every startup with all that laws. No time to develop the product, because there is a lot of bureaucracy that take all your time.

simion314 7y ago
So Google should be allowed to grab your content and put it on their page - but if you make a video of yourself and put it on youtube and a car with the stereo appeared for a few seconds in it your video is claimed. It is like all the laws that make big companies money are good and the ones that make the same big companies less money are bad.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Hang on, the issue you have with copyright claims is made far worse by EU law..
  - simion314 7y ago
    How? who is affected negatively ? creators,publishers, the people in the short term or in the long term?
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Creators, long-term. EU argues we're giving creators new freedoms, but really, we're stripping the freedom to criticize, make parody and remix from all but the biggest corporations who can afford to pay the license fees. Fair use doesn't have a legal standing in the EU right now.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  Google is not the one issuing takedown requests on YouTube for music in the background. This whole concept of a small sample of something violating copyright IMHO is the death of culture, it's excessively injecting chilling effects and barriers into information sharing. We went through this in the 80s with Hip-Hop artists and sampling. I mean, if my son quotes a paragraph out of a French news website for a term paper, and that paper is published online, is it now a copyright violation? When does text summarization down to 2-3 sentences violate copyright? How far do we take this? The publishers business models are collapsing, but their foray into hyper monetization and litigiousness surrounding any use of what they publish, if anything, will only serve to speed up they're demise. We have to find alternate models to support local journalism, and this ain't gonna help.

xorcist 7y ago

This would have been a logical part of robots.txt from the beginning. Under an earlier Google this would probably not have been allowed to escalate this far.

theboulevardier 7y ago

Google has also started classifying non-news sites as being news sites and no removing snippets from them. I have already had to manually change the designation in the Google Search Console on a couple of sites that I look after this week after Google flagged them. I'd recommend that site owners check in the search console to see if they are affected.

buboard 7y ago

This is good. More clicks to the news sites and google is more like Reddit now. But it is sad that there had to be a law for that. Gooogle should give the option to remove anything but the title from the page result (is this possible?).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jhall1468 7y ago
Less clicks. Much less. It's exactly what happened in Germany. They "won" and then saw their Google click-through rate plummet, which was a significant % of their click-throughs.
- buboard 7y ago
  Less clicks through search for sure. This however may render google news useless, and increase direct traffic instead
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Would a news stand being forced to cover all the newspapers in black bags drive more sales to online orders?
    - buboard 7y ago
      That s not what s happening. Paper Newspapers have a frontpage for a reason: only titles, not the content. If you want more, buy it
Klathmon 7y ago
Google already did give the option of publishers controlling the way their content shows in places like Google news, including multiple controls over if the snippets are shown, how much text can be shown, whether the google cached link should be shown, and more. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

lettergram 7y ago

After reading the comments (on HN) and the law I think this is a good thing. I’m rather confused by the visceral response by some people on HN. It may be an unpopular opinion, but Google was stealing. They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. What this means for content creators is that you couldn’t make revenue. If I search for something on Google I get so much information above the fold (and ads), I pretty much never see a real site. That’s a serious issue, because Google isn’t creating that content. Worse, their using their monopoly to push the AMP framework to make it easier to get snippets and actually serve your content on their servers. No, this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Almost all decent sized websites add their own preview and snippets (which Google can display). So all it does is enable further controls to publishers.

danShumway 7y ago
> They were showing enough information [that] no one was clicking the links. This is a testable claim. If snippets were preventing people from clicking the links, then publisher revenue should rise now that Google isn't showing any information. Now, keep in mind that every single time this experiment has been tried in Europe in the past, publisher revenues plummeted. But maybe this time will be different.
sbx320 7y ago
> They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the opposite seems to be true. Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80% drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.
- lettergram 7y ago
  I mean, those claims are anecdotal at best and more importantly Google controls what people see, which is kind of my point. You can’t validate Google isn’t manipulating results. They have every incentive to manipulate them. I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?

nkkollaw 7y ago

Not that Google News is any good. My newsfeed is basically far-left propaganda. I would almost go as far as to say that this is a good thing for France.

remotecool 7y ago

This is why more countries need to break away from the EU.

skybrian 7y ago

I'm a bit confused by this because Google News has only been showing headlines since their last redesign. I guess they will stop showing images as well? I think that would be an improvement.

dghughes 7y ago

This reminds me of the daily posting on reddit in the GPDR subreddit. People are shocked that the countries outside the EU are not respecting the GPDR. Or more shocked that a website would rather not do bushiness with or block people in the EU from seeing their website. Most times a website put up bannersaying "yadda yadda cookies...privacy...agree/disagree?" and that's that.

OrgNet 7y ago

I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner and all over the world.

pkaye 7y ago

> The change means French users will only see the headlines and not the first few lines or a thumbnail image for news content unless European publishers specifically request to show previews, the company said. I'm guessing some publishers will give permissions and eventually forcing others to follow suit when they start losing traffic.

rendall 7y ago

Google is still a new phenomena, and we are still trying to come to terms with it as a society. It's the first global monopoly, and it's on information. Holy cow, that's just strange. I applaud the EU for at least attempting to grapple with the potential existential threat that Google represents, rather than rolling over and pretending nothing is wrong as the US does; or censoring, as China does. Even though I think the specific solution is probably unhelpful, it's much better than pretending that everything is as it should be, and crowing when newspapers get their "comeuppance" when Google punishes them by reducing their traffic.

buboard 7y ago
The US is not pretending; there is actually nothing wrong because googld is a US business. EU is following china here, building a covert great firewall in an attempt to resurrect local market. A little too late though
- rendall 7y ago
  You didn't address the main point. So to expand on it, Google is effectively an information monopoly, which means that it uses its market dominance to restrict competition. Moreover, it also uses its position to influence the web and public opinion itself in ways for which there is no precedent. The US is not addressing this last aspect in any respect. Not sure what Google being an American company has to do with that.

riclad1 7y ago

This law is pointless , it was tried in germany and spain, result,google news closed down. google news provide a service , free , no ads. if a newspaper wants to get paid for links or snippets, it should expect that most websites will opt out. The result is less traffic to newspaper websites, see google reader, google plus etc no one can force google to provide a service, even if it has millions of users. If it does, not fit in google,s plans the service will disappear . IT WOULD Be disastrous if google actually paid for a snippet, IT,S , a slipperly slope, next thing is google will have to pay to link to Any european news or list them in the search results. Say i,m looking for news on brexit, i should not have to go to 30 different websites, going to google news is a much better option. The european newspaper companys remind me of of music companys in the 90,s , they were facing declining sales of cds, , music piracy, they launched apps or various mediocre incompatible music service,s with drm some of which only worked on phone,s or pc,s or various devices, and used various , It required steve jobs to appear and apple to invent the ipod and itunes , a simple service ,buy music, buy albums, ,1 song for 99 cents ,all music in mp3 format. Then streaming came along and the music industry is actually making more money every year as people get used to paying subscriptions for apple music, spotify etc The News industry needs a tech genius to come along who knows how the web works , what users want, what they will pay for , Maybe have a website, New,s .fr, news,germany.com, news,spain.com etc Where any news paper or blog can post links to news storys or any article. WIth ads if they want , Any news paper with a website can post on the website, it would be run by a semi independent board, so its not under the control of just one company .

andrerm 7y ago

How does Google rank pages with and without nosnippet?

Equanimous 7y ago

Websites do have enough possibilities to restrict legal access to their content. Google is respecting entries in robots.txt for search restrictions. If some media lobbyists are whining about Google not paying for their news snippets they talk about it like they are forced to show snippets from their site on Google but in fact, they are not. They just want to cash grab successful internet companies and initiate a smear campaign against them like it is done in several newspapers in Germany in the last few weeks.

Mozilz_spoofing 7y ago

Publishers have always been able to choose whether or not they want their content to be accessible through Google's search engine or Google News. We have just put in place more granular webmaster settings that allow publishers to specify how much information they want to appear as a preview in the search results. Publishers around the world can use these new settings to choose the type of preview best suited to attract users to their site. This just proves that it was all about making Google pay and not about control.