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Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers fr

Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down. Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content. Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft! My guess is that Yelp is next. EDIT: I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

arielm 7y ago
I don’t know if blaming google is the only solution here - it’s really Quora’s fault for not building a good way to monetize into their platform. Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.
rowathray 7y ago
Poor Quora and Trip Advisor. Let us play our tiny violins on their behalf.
- codingslave 7y ago
  I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now.
asiachick 7y ago
I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall. An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.
- therealcamino 7y ago
  Yes, Google entered into a settlement with the FTC in 2013 for, among other things, scraping sites like Yelp and presenting the info directly in search results. Google didn't have any of their own reviews at the time. "In its 2013 settlement, the FTC ruled against Google on scraping. Rivals can now opt out of having their content lifted, without fear of being demoted in the search rankings." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-illegally-took-content-from-amazon-yelp-tripadvisor-ftc-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
- ghaff 7y ago
  Yelp isn’t USA only but it definitely tends to be a lot thinner outside the US then inside. TripAdvisor also has somewhat reasonable coverage internationally. In my experience, none of these sites are great but they’re probably better than walking into a random restaurant.
manigandham 7y ago
They can (and do) put their content behind a login sometimes to prevent this. Either way Google only gets answers as long those answers exist somewhere so I doubt Quora and its alternatives are going away. The site should be rather cheap to run as well (although it's easy to mismanage millions these days).
- ausjke 7y ago
  no, I left my door open to share my indoor library with neighbors does not mean you can take them away, google is supposed to help me to locate those original content, it should stay as a search engine to keep fair play of original content providers.
charlesju 7y ago
I think there is a symbiotic relationship here. Google still needs to feed enough traffic into their main training sets so it can keep training. If these training sets were to fully die (or become stale) then the Google NLP would be equally useless. So Google has an inherent desire to prop up Quora, if anything. Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.
- getgoogled 7y ago
  Right, i don't think google displays the entire quora answer set, i see the google snippets of a quora answer set as an ad the click the quora link and read all the quora answers. I certainly don't trust that Google has actually extracted the complete set of valuable info from a quora page. Just like Stackoverflow i want to read many answers and many opinions. I would bet the when google presents a quora snippet, the quora page has MORE traffic.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I wouldn't call it symbiotic, parasitic might be closer to the truth.
xiphias2 7y ago
Quora and Tripadvisor are totally different. Tripadvisor has a great mobile app, and actually a mobile app makes sense, as I want to browse local results, filter and compare restaurants and activities easily. As for quora, it's more like entertainment where I just want it to be part of my internet browsing experience, just like Reddit, where I don't want to load a mobile app just so see a result.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
plerpin 7y ago
Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.
- codingslave 7y ago
  yeah I also think their machine learning is terrible. Their recommendation engine was so bad that I unsubscribed, it was completely overfit.
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago. Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10? I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing. That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.
    - codingslave 7y ago
      I think they panicked a bit and went with high growth strategies that ruined the integrity of the platform
- to1y 7y ago
  That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure every time I've Googled something and got a Quora link and clicked it, it's just been an ad. I just don't click Quora links anymore.
harikb 7y ago
So far what I have seen is Google search giving snippets or Google AMP optimizing for mobile. Still the content is physically from some page verbatim. The AI/NLP comes in only in top 0.1% kind of queries like “what is the weather” or “what is my IP address”. Saying Google’s AI is learning everything is like blaming Chinese for stealing all tech. Yes, it happens at some cases, but not likely. I am surprised to see so much Google hatred here.
- codingslave 7y ago
  The newest research out of the Google AI labs is all centered around extractive summarazation. Led by a researcher from CMU named William Cohen. Their next big business is content extraction.
  - bawolff 7y ago
    What the R&D dept aspires to maybe do in the future is hardly the same as what they do in the present.
    - codingslave 7y ago
      The extracted content on their search page is just the beginning. They are spending huge efforts to get better at it. Specifically, extracting information from multiple pages at the same time. Eventually it will mostly be a query interface that surfaces information for fact based queries.
      - babayega2 7y ago
        Exactly. I have been recently just using the drop down to read a summarize answer to questions I have googled. No need to go further...
geofft 7y ago
> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web? TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google. If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care. If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).
- bertil 7y ago
  Quora is compensating writers (at least those they deem the best) as Partners.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    How do you know this? The only published program is paying for questions, and they had a trial of "knowledge prizes" years ago as a contest for the best answers but it was shut down. As a "top writer" for 2 years, I've heard nothing about any payments for writers.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The paradox is, if these companies fold, Google has to get the data from somewhere.
  - deleted 7y ago
bogomipz 7y ago
>"Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets." I understand that Google competes with Trip Advisor with their own travel offering but might you or someone else explain how they use NLP algorithms steal business from them? Also could you elaborate on how they might be using NLP on Quora to their advantage. Where or how do they compete with Quora exactly? Thanks.
catalogia 7y ago
Is it actually theft, or do you actually mean it's something more mundane like copyright infringement or a TOS violation?
- dylan604 7y ago
  I don't know what the legal definition of theft is, but to me if you take something without permission (even if it is just a copy) it is theft. Of course, I'm nobody, so it doesn't matter what I think. However, if we all acted like humans instead of lawyers (which by definition are no longer human), I think most people would agree with the above definition.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    It seems to me, conflating copyright infringement with theft is little better than conflating it with piracy. Both are hyperbolic. To be honest, it's not even clear to me that what google did was copyright infringement. It seems distasteful, even dishonorable, but I'm not convinced it goes beyond that.
bschwindHN 7y ago
To be honest I'm happy to hear quora is struggling. It was always an annoying page to use. I'll be happy to see Yelp go down too, I don't like the idea of extortion under the threat of bad reviews.
streetcat1 7y ago
So can they block the google crawler? If they do not then they not really care about being crawled. The problem is not the monopolistic and profit-driven practice. It is that consumers are not willing to pay for anything and do not mind for their data to be mined, hence the only way for B2C are ads.
anonytrary 7y ago
> Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes This frustrates me, but I think Quora's UX and marketing decisions greatly exacerbated this effect. Quora shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun thanks to their sign up walls. At one point (and probably still true), you couldn't even click a link to a related question within Quora itself without being forced to sign up. This acts as a resistance, causing people to essentially bounce from Quora back to Google after the first click, so they can get a related question or answer, which Google provides thousands of pages of for free. Google was on one corner selling fresh-pressed lemonade, and Quora opened a lemonade stand for 10x the price on the exact same corner. Rumor has it, Google's lemonade tasted better anyway.
- randompi 7y ago
  Which reminds me Facebook's wall worked perfectly for them. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind signing up yet another account among the hundreds of accounts I already have.
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Just in case, add a question mark at the end of the Quora URL (that prompts you to login) and refresh. Links from within Quora miss that and then you are prompted to login, but if you add the question mark you can access the target without logging in.
  - arcturus17 7y ago
    Thanks for the tip and I mean that genuinely but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience.
    - jaclaz 7y ago
      >but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience. Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions). I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding using it because of the mostly terribly bad content) whilst another user that doesn't know the trick and doesn't want to login may have the illusion that the content, once accessed, may have some value.
johnebgd 7y ago
Yelp reviews are one of the biggest differentiators for me. Google reviews are always all positive. Not that I see them much anymore. I switched to DDG and will not be switching back.
chewz 7y ago
> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web? Judging by the number of copycat sites surfacing in Google search results I don't think there is anything monopolistic in stealing the content. Remember internet portals? Google is slowly transforming from search engine into one.
gundmc 7y ago
Is there any data to back up this claim? Anecdotally I can't think of a single query that I used to click through to an answers site like quora or stack exchange that is now addressed my the knowledge box snippet.
digitalengineer 7y ago
Its even bigger than that. You can book an appointment through the google.com search results if the company (lets say a barber shop) has connected their booking system with the Google My Business page. No need to visit the website at all. How long until a percentage is automatically taken for every booking?
idclip 7y ago
We will probably see a great rift occur, its really mind boggling. The internet is ... plastic. All these algorithms, and mass herding of the human flock ... and the centralization ... it goes against basic natural laws if you ask me!
tjpnz 7y ago
>Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content. Most of the companies I've worked for are largely oblivious to this and continue to invest heavily in making their pages appear attractive to Google - even when the end result is negligible at best. It seems to be a really good way of draining developer resources at the expense of innovation. But perhaps that was the intention all along.

arielm 7y ago

I don’t know if blaming google is the only solution here - it’s really Quora’s fault for not building a good way to monetize into their platform. Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.

rowathray 7y ago

Poor Quora and Trip Advisor. Let us play our tiny violins on their behalf.

codingslave 7y ago
I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now.

asiachick 7y ago

I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall. An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.

therealcamino 7y ago
Yes, Google entered into a settlement with the FTC in 2013 for, among other things, scraping sites like Yelp and presenting the info directly in search results. Google didn't have any of their own reviews at the time. "In its 2013 settlement, the FTC ruled against Google on scraping. Rivals can now opt out of having their content lifted, without fear of being demoted in the search rankings." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-illegally-took-content-from-amazon-yelp-tripadvisor-ftc-report https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...
ghaff 7y ago
Yelp isn’t USA only but it definitely tends to be a lot thinner outside the US then inside. TripAdvisor also has somewhat reasonable coverage internationally. In my experience, none of these sites are great but they’re probably better than walking into a random restaurant.

manigandham 7y ago

They can (and do) put their content behind a login sometimes to prevent this. Either way Google only gets answers as long those answers exist somewhere so I doubt Quora and its alternatives are going away. The site should be rather cheap to run as well (although it's easy to mismanage millions these days).

ausjke 7y ago
no, I left my door open to share my indoor library with neighbors does not mean you can take them away, google is supposed to help me to locate those original content, it should stay as a search engine to keep fair play of original content providers.

charlesju 7y ago

I think there is a symbiotic relationship here. Google still needs to feed enough traffic into their main training sets so it can keep training. If these training sets were to fully die (or become stale) then the Google NLP would be equally useless. So Google has an inherent desire to prop up Quora, if anything. Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.

getgoogled 7y ago
Right, i don't think google displays the entire quora answer set, i see the google snippets of a quora answer set as an ad the click the quora link and read all the quora answers. I certainly don't trust that Google has actually extracted the complete set of valuable info from a quora page. Just like Stackoverflow i want to read many answers and many opinions. I would bet the when google presents a quora snippet, the quora page has MORE traffic.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
I wouldn't call it symbiotic, parasitic might be closer to the truth.

xiphias2 7y ago

Quora and Tripadvisor are totally different. Tripadvisor has a great mobile app, and actually a mobile app makes sense, as I want to browse local results, filter and compare restaurants and activities easily. As for quora, it's more like entertainment where I just want it to be part of my internet browsing experience, just like Reddit, where I don't want to load a mobile app just so see a result.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

plerpin 7y ago

Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.

codingslave 7y ago
yeah I also think their machine learning is terrible. Their recommendation engine was so bad that I unsubscribed, it was completely overfit.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago. Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10? I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing. That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.
  - codingslave 7y ago
    I think they panicked a bit and went with high growth strategies that ruined the integrity of the platform
to1y 7y ago
That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure every time I've Googled something and got a Quora link and clicked it, it's just been an ad. I just don't click Quora links anymore.

harikb 7y ago

So far what I have seen is Google search giving snippets or Google AMP optimizing for mobile. Still the content is physically from some page verbatim. The AI/NLP comes in only in top 0.1% kind of queries like “what is the weather” or “what is my IP address”. Saying Google’s AI is learning everything is like blaming Chinese for stealing all tech. Yes, it happens at some cases, but not likely. I am surprised to see so much Google hatred here.

codingslave 7y ago
The newest research out of the Google AI labs is all centered around extractive summarazation. Led by a researcher from CMU named William Cohen. Their next big business is content extraction.
- bawolff 7y ago
  What the R&D dept aspires to maybe do in the future is hardly the same as what they do in the present.
  - codingslave 7y ago
    The extracted content on their search page is just the beginning. They are spending huge efforts to get better at it. Specifically, extracting information from multiple pages at the same time. Eventually it will mostly be a query interface that surfaces information for fact based queries.
    - babayega2 7y ago
      Exactly. I have been recently just using the drop down to read a summarize answer to questions I have googled. No need to go further...

geofft 7y ago

> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web? TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google. If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care. If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).

bertil 7y ago
Quora is compensating writers (at least those they deem the best) as Partners.
- manigandham 7y ago
  How do you know this? The only published program is paying for questions, and they had a trial of "knowledge prizes" years ago as a contest for the best answers but it was shut down. As a "top writer" for 2 years, I've heard nothing about any payments for writers.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The paradox is, if these companies fold, Google has to get the data from somewhere.
- deleted 7y ago

bogomipz 7y ago

>"Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets." I understand that Google competes with Trip Advisor with their own travel offering but might you or someone else explain how they use NLP algorithms steal business from them? Also could you elaborate on how they might be using NLP on Quora to their advantage. Where or how do they compete with Quora exactly? Thanks.

catalogia 7y ago

Is it actually theft, or do you actually mean it's something more mundane like copyright infringement or a TOS violation?

dylan604 7y ago
I don't know what the legal definition of theft is, but to me if you take something without permission (even if it is just a copy) it is theft. Of course, I'm nobody, so it doesn't matter what I think. However, if we all acted like humans instead of lawyers (which by definition are no longer human), I think most people would agree with the above definition.
- catalogia 7y ago
  It seems to me, conflating copyright infringement with theft is little better than conflating it with piracy. Both are hyperbolic. To be honest, it's not even clear to me that what google did was copyright infringement. It seems distasteful, even dishonorable, but I'm not convinced it goes beyond that.

bschwindHN 7y ago

To be honest I'm happy to hear quora is struggling. It was always an annoying page to use. I'll be happy to see Yelp go down too, I don't like the idea of extortion under the threat of bad reviews.

streetcat1 7y ago

So can they block the google crawler? If they do not then they not really care about being crawled. The problem is not the monopolistic and profit-driven practice. It is that consumers are not willing to pay for anything and do not mind for their data to be mined, hence the only way for B2C are ads.

anonytrary 7y ago

> Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes This frustrates me, but I think Quora's UX and marketing decisions greatly exacerbated this effect. Quora shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun thanks to their sign up walls. At one point (and probably still true), you couldn't even click a link to a related question within Quora itself without being forced to sign up. This acts as a resistance, causing people to essentially bounce from Quora back to Google after the first click, so they can get a related question or answer, which Google provides thousands of pages of for free. Google was on one corner selling fresh-pressed lemonade, and Quora opened a lemonade stand for 10x the price on the exact same corner. Rumor has it, Google's lemonade tasted better anyway.

randompi 7y ago
Which reminds me Facebook's wall worked perfectly for them. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind signing up yet another account among the hundreds of accounts I already have.
jaclaz 7y ago
Just in case, add a question mark at the end of the Quora URL (that prompts you to login) and refresh. Links from within Quora miss that and then you are prompted to login, but if you add the question mark you can access the target without logging in.
- arcturus17 7y ago
  Thanks for the tip and I mean that genuinely but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience.
  - jaclaz 7y ago
    >but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience. Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions). I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding using it because of the mostly terribly bad content) whilst another user that doesn't know the trick and doesn't want to login may have the illusion that the content, once accessed, may have some value.

johnebgd 7y ago

Yelp reviews are one of the biggest differentiators for me. Google reviews are always all positive. Not that I see them much anymore. I switched to DDG and will not be switching back.

chewz 7y ago

> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web? Judging by the number of copycat sites surfacing in Google search results I don't think there is anything monopolistic in stealing the content. Remember internet portals? Google is slowly transforming from search engine into one.

gundmc 7y ago

Is there any data to back up this claim? Anecdotally I can't think of a single query that I used to click through to an answers site like quora or stack exchange that is now addressed my the knowledge box snippet.

digitalengineer 7y ago

Its even bigger than that. You can book an appointment through the google.com search results if the company (lets say a barber shop) has connected their booking system with the Google My Business page. No need to visit the website at all. How long until a percentage is automatically taken for every booking?

idclip 7y ago

We will probably see a great rift occur, its really mind boggling. The internet is ... plastic. All these algorithms, and mass herding of the human flock ... and the centralization ... it goes against basic natural laws if you ask me!

tjpnz 7y ago

>Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content. Most of the companies I've worked for are largely oblivious to this and continue to invest heavily in making their pages appear attractive to Google - even when the end result is negligible at best. It seems to be a really good way of draining developer resources at the expense of innovation. But perhaps that was the intention all along.