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Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

435 points by mosiuerbarso 6y ago

visarga 6y ago
I read the statement and think Google used and then and abused their service, but at the same time, publishing a database of people's net worth strikes me as being pretty unethical. Would they have been able to handle a GDPR request? Why didn't they put their own and their families info up there first?
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Makes it even sadder that Google now scrapes all of it and provides the information themselves
- gberger 6y ago
  In Sweden, Finland, and Norway, everyone's income tax records are public. Is that unethical?
  - mayankkaizen 6y ago
    My immediate reaction would be, "yes, it is unethical for many reasons". But again, I heard the social welfare system in these countries is best in the world. So may be I shouldn't complain. However, if I don't want to disclose my net worth and if law is on my side in my country, then Google making my data available is definitely wrong.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I would say it is clearly not unethical, but it can still be a bad decision. I would say it is a disadvantage for everyone in low or medium income regions.
  - markalexander 6y ago
    Ethical is a bit of a wide term but I’m sure it’s easy to construct situations that are problematic. E.g. an abusive ex partner can check whether you’re likely to have switched job, even from the most basic info. If tax paid is revealed then you can work out what government benefits a person might be on, including those relating to health and disability. Isn’t the implementation in Norway such that the press have special access not afforded to individuals? That also seems pretty questionable.
    - Phaedor 6y ago
      Everyone have access but you have to log in with your ID and the ones you check can see that you checked them. You can check 500 people each month. Your scenario seems pretty far fetched to me since this information will be published in October for the previous year. It contains the income and tax for the whole year only. It would be pretty difficult to know the information you suggest from the limited, delayed records. As a Norwegian I fully support our system with public tax records.
      - op03 6y ago
        Interesting. Hadn't heard about this before. Curious about how it is used by the public. And can businesses login and check too?
        Phaedor 6y ago
        Arbitrary businesses cannot access it no. However the press can gain special access for a small fee. This means that when the lists are published there are always a lot of news articles about how much various public people earn. There are limitations on how they can use it though, and they cannot publish the whole lists.
        op03 6y ago
        Interesting. Thanks for posting about it.
      - markalexander 6y ago
        I’m not sure how delayed records would stop you working out disability status or any other sensitive status that affects tax paid. The tax regime for any given year is presumably public info. People are notified but that’s hardly going to stop someone seeking to upset you as in the example scenario. Though as I understand the press can do mass lookups with no notification. Don’t you find that disparity concerning? The idea that the government gets to decide what counts as ‘press’ is already something people from countries that don’t operate that way would consider objectionable. Let alone giving them the power to decide who should be 'outed' for their tax affairs. To be fair, that's perhaps more an issue of this particular implementation, rather than fundamental. But it's an example of how it can be used to entrench the establishment.
- xlii 6y ago
  In the transcribed hearing founder makes it clear that it's more about educated guess based on publicly available information. Net worth and not the owned assets which is completely different number (as celebrities usually have rights to their personal brands which are not transferable). In general this in theory could be challenged, but mostly based on the name and photos and not about inferred information. This might get even worse since a lot of celebrities are using stage names which might be protected as a brand but go unprotected as a personal information.
throwaway189262 6y ago
And yet I constantly get CAPTCHA's just from blocking tracking cookies. The biggest scraper of them all goes to incredible lengths to prevent scraping. How ironic. I hope the US govt demolishes these monopolies. It's not just in web either, the closest historical precedent I can think of is the Robber Barons of the 30's
- ehnto 6y ago
  It's them protecting their technology moat I figure, not so ironic, more of a hoarder protecting their hoard.
- Google234 6y ago
  There’s a thing called a robot.txt.
  - xondono 6y ago
    Yes, and google has been observed several times to ignore the robots.txt file
    - Google234 6y ago
      No, this is true in general. Maybe there’s been some bugs (I would be surprised, can you link these multiple examples?) but Google respects robot.txt files
  - pkilgore 6y ago
    Even assuming Google would not ignore that for a popular enough site (they would know!), there is no robot.txt setting that says "index my site, but please don't steal my content, thanks."
  - throwaway189262 6y ago
    Yeah then they won't index you at all and you lose all your traffic instantly. How about a setting to index my site without scaping my content and using it all over the place without attribution
j88439h84 6y ago
> Are everyday consumers harmed by Google’s practices YES How are consumers harmed by Google presenting extracted data in an infobox? Isn't it more convenient?
- redslazer 6y ago
  The consumer is harmed because there is no one incentivised to create new content, or at least the incentives are severely diminished. In the story here the celebrity net worth data had to be created and this was worth doing due to the ad revenue. Making the existing data available to consumer is a benefit but the negative is the lack of new content. So now consumer have easier access to old, inaccurate data.
- dunnock 6y ago
  I think what author said is explained in the article, as that such approach undermines small businesses which provide informational services. They won't be able to hire data analysts and researchers anymore, hence quality of information in info boxes will decline as information gets outdated. In other words Google is stealing data presenting as it's own taking all the benefits of embedding ads data
- mdoms 6y ago
  Is convenience the only axis that we care about now?
- zeepzeep 6y ago
  You don't get the traffic -> you don't earn money (google does).
- the_gipsy 6y ago
  In this instance, yes, it's convenient for the user. In the global scheme of things, it kills innovation and competition, so that hurts the end user.
lalaland1125 6y ago
I think Google is in the right here. Facts are not protected by copyright and they shouldn't be. Imagine being able to copyright the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. It would be a disaster.
- sunnyam 6y ago
  Have you read the written statement? He says that it's not commodity information like the height of a building or the the current time. Just like Forbes, they employed a team of fact-checkers to find and generate estimates. Knowing the exact net worth of a celebrity isn't just a fact that someone can determine and so for Google to steal that information, which is the result of research and scrutiny is wrong.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Some things are facts, like the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. But other things aren't facts, and where something isn't a fact but instead is implicit knowledge derived from a set of both data and assumptions (like a model or an algorithm) Google should absolutely not be taking that data and treating it as their own. Given the PDF includes this quote "I decided to build a company that attempted to make educated guesses based on the sourcing of a full-time research team." I think we can assume that the data on CelebrityNetWorth wasn't "facts". However, even if CelebrityNetWorth's data were facts, I don't believe Google should be able allowed to replicate the work that people have put in to building a website that lists facts. Google could, and eventually probably will, replace every fact based website with a sidebar in their results page. People can't compete with that. That's using Google's (de facto) search results monopoly to stop people searching the web. That's making the web worse. That's stifling innovation. I might be able to dream up some way of using CelebrityNetWorth data to improve the world (somehow...), and Google would be stopping that. The engineers who work at Google need to stop ruining the web by trying to turn it in to their own walled garden.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    This is interesting. The final outcome could be that CNW shuts down. Then, the data won’t be updated. So then google will have to drop the info box. And then someone will come along with an idea to track the net worth of celebrities... Has Google set up some kind of hysteresis that results in the long term, repeated building and subsequent crushing of data aggregation companies?
dunnock 6y ago
You would not expect of such big business to behave in a different way. What we consumers can do is to try to use alternative services where we can, e.g. I am happy with using Firefox instead of Chrome
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jtxx 6y ago
  same + duckduckgo & protonmail
errantmind 6y ago
It looks more like an ethical argument than a legal one. I don't understand how this data would be protected under US law. Can someone explain if you think otherwise? Is the issue that the data was scraped? Or is the issue Google appropriated the scraped data for use in their search results? From my perspective it just looks like a bad business model: spend a lot of time and effort estimating net worth, and then publish it on the open web. Publicly available data can be freely and legally scraped (and I wouldn't want it any other way): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
- philprx 6y ago
  It's the business model of many online blogs and sites, and get payment through ads. Of course it's not a really strong model now that ads revenue are going down. It was a strong one not so long ago. Now it's clearly IPR theft, present it how you like, but theft is theft. Plus it's not really smart from Google given their prior contact and request to this company on APIs and providing it for free. Now the real question: Is Google going to go away with it blaming it on "rogue employee" and continuing on dispensing huge sum of cash and free advisory to gov and internet NGOs in their constant advocacy effort...
  - errantmind 6y ago
    >> Now it's clearly IPR theft, present it how you like, but theft is theft. I don't quite see the legal basis for it being theft. Can you explain?
    - philprx 6y ago
      IANAL: 1. Google doesn't show in-line'd data box with Net worth 2. Google asks site (CNW) for access, is denied. 3. Google then shows site's data in data box (with CNW site proof of theft with canary tokens being the fake celebrity's net worth) that are now presented as Google's data (no source or fake source), without license from original site. If that isn't theft of data, what is it? From the PDFs, there is no license for free re-use ;-) While I'm all-in for freedom of information and open source documentation license or open data licenses, I fully understand the need of businesses to protect their intellectual property and rights.
philprx 6y ago
"Don't be evil" ;-) Is it still Google's motto?
- InfinityByTen 6y ago
  They deprecated that years ago.
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Gotta say, I preferred Google v1.0. The subsequent patches suck.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      Android, Chromium and Kubernetes have come a long way. Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.
      - tester34 6y ago
        >Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. Is it even true? MS does a lot of open source
        techntoke 6y ago
        Yes if you compare the code base size and the core components. Microsoft still hasn't open sourced it's main consumer operating system and neither has Apple.
        perseusmandate 6y ago
        Not a valid comparison since those are core products of both companies. Google hasn't and never will open source Search.
gundmc 6y ago
Out of curiosity, I tried searching a number of "$X Net Worth Queries" to see how it looks today. Snoop Dogg, Mike Trout, Will Smith. For each I got an infobox sourced from Wikipedia or a news article and Celebrity Net Worth was somewhere in the top 1-3 organic results.
- philprx 6y ago
  When you consider the impact/cost of an anti-trust case vs. the ease for Google to change rankings so that the evidence site (CNW) is back in the top 3 results... Of course you would do that if you were Google... And here there's nothing illegal, it would just defuse more journalistic bombs for Google. Smart move.
system2 6y ago
I felt sad reading the whole thing. I searched "will smith net worth" and after wikipedia snippet, the first result was celebrity net worth. CNW depends on google, uses them to make money. Google is a search tool and wants to show whatever results makes users happy. CNW can simply remove itself from the platform and tell google never to use their data. It almost sounds like CNW is trying to bite the hand of only company made them something. I feel bad for CNW but this is natural. I've seen many of my and my clients' sites go rock bottom because of google updates. "Google Stole My Business" sounds harsh. More like "google doesn't do what I want them to do." CNW was nothing before google. Maybe CNW could make technical changes to their content the way wallpaper/graphics sites made changes after google image search updates.
- huffmsa 6y ago
  "Google Takes My Data and Presents It as Their Own" a better title for you?
  - system2 6y ago
    No of course not. My point is that google will change things as they did in the past. The way google snippet works is simple, they scan the data and sum it up. I searched multiple results right now. "bill gates net worth" data was taken from Wikipedia and CNW didn't even exist on the first page. "Beyonce net worth" showed a detailed snippet for businessinsider, and second link was CNW. Same for Eminem, 210M from groovewallet, and second result was CNW. I just couldn't find what CNW is complaining about.
    - huffmsa 6y ago
      And the wikipedia page cites https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=billionaires#46f7f1c3689f https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=billionaires... As the source for Bill Gates' net worth. Why can a free, community edited website successfully attribute it's sources but a trillion dollar company cannot?
      - 6y ago
renewiltord 6y ago
Information wants to be free, man.
- philprx 6y ago
  Yes, that's OK if it's symmetrical: why can't we easily automate Google search results? It's asymetry here that is the problem, not Information Freedom. And i'm pretty sure this is the line/dark pattern Google is hoping for: that people give credit to Google for "Information Freedom"... missing the real issue.
- tommilukkarinen 6y ago
  Obviously it is not just about information, but anything they can scrape bucks out of. If it were a service they could copy, they would. Meaning probably your job as well. So fine, they copy it and you are fine with it, you still offer a premium and theirs is a cheap copy and you have a business. But in addition, to maximize profits, they also somehow prevent you selling your service. Like they did here by hiding visibility. Meaning that they don't just offer same kind of thing, but prevent anyone buying anything but their own product. And you will keep thinking this will happen to someone else, until it happens to you. It just starts from artists, writers, etc. whose work happens to be easy to copy with the current technology.
praveen9920 6y ago
I'm not sure if this is ethical and legal problem. But one thing for sure is Google has too much leverage both technically and financially. Google has slowly increased the reliability on Google for consumers everywhere that they are essentially a monopoly which is bad for the market. It is about time a new player comes into picture with same user interface and different business model which can empower these internet entrepreneurs.
- techntoke 6y ago
  The same could be said for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. At least Google open sources their operating system, browser and are mostly responsible for Kubernetes. If people are going to have such high expectations of one company why do they not equally apply the judgement.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    There is also similar problems with all those companies too, not sure why you think that is some kind of defence of Google.
    - techntoke 6y ago
      Because those companies are ignored while everyone jumps aboard the Google hate train, and if anything is going to be done to fix it then those changes need to be applied equally to all companies at the same time. Otherwise it does more harm than good.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        People complain about the actions of all those companies quite regularly, Google isn't a victim here.
teddyh 6y ago
The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its disposal to significantly harm or snuff out a rival. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our organic rankings have continued to suffer since I’ve become a vocal critic of their practices. Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse. As a result we were also banned from using the Google’s dominant Ad Mob mobile ad platform. This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.
- ehnto 6y ago
  Well we can hope to surface avenues of monopolistic behavior that allow a company to abuse their position within the confines of the law through committees like this. Just because it follows the letter of the law doesn't mean it's not malicious or damaging.
- tareqak 6y ago
  > And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build. A number might not be copyrightable, but what about a news article? What would happen if all the world’s new sites just denied the Google crawler using robots.txt? What if they also returned 404s if accessed from an IP address known to be owned by Google?
  - Jefff8 6y ago
    Databases have protection under EU law. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-databases https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-dat... The EU is also interested in Google, and this looks like a slam-dunk case on the face of it.
manish_gill 6y ago
I have Zero respect for the Google engineers and PMs who worked on this project, scraping content without attributing to the original source, and subsequent change in the search ranking of the original source. A very bad taste in the mouth indeed.
- dimsumsumdim 6y ago
  I am not trying to defend Google or its practices. But how is the activity of CNW researchers different from what is Google doing? Unless the author elaborates on their method, "Educated guess" sounds like scrapping content without sourcing the author in the first place.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    AFAIK there's no other database that they scrapped from. Reading sources like news articles, documents etc. is very different from copying the database that someone else created. It's like the difference of tapping Yelp's API and create a competing service and looking at Yelp, Google, Squirespace etc. to create a restorant recommendations website.
    - dimsumsumdim 6y ago
      Humans can also scrap. If CNW employs researchers, they must be using sources. These sources are not referenced in their content. Either CNW is merely making up the net worth figures, or their researchers are pulling data from somewhere to provide information about 25,000+ celebrities. If the second is valid, they aren't that different from what Google is doing.
      - mrtksn 6y ago
        I answered your question about how CNW researchers are different. Using sources to create a knowledge base for something is very different than hooking up to a knowledge base that was already curated and displaying it as your own without compensating the people who curated it. Yes, sure. It would be nice of them to disclose their own sources too but I fail to see how this is related to Google straight out copying their curated database and showing it to its own users. Like, why are we discussing it? What is the agenda here? Are we trying to conclude that CNW owners are also not that nice? Are you claiming that CNW copied your own research and demand justice too? If you explain what is your point here, maybe we can have a productive discussion instead of repeating the same stuff.
tehabe 6y ago
An odd witness for the very true issues people have with Google Search. Google is crediting all websites it uses information from. It might be sad for such a site but I wonder how the creator thought that this is sustainable. Sites with biographical data for famous people already existed and for them adding net worth information is easy. So if not Google had kill them, they might have being killed by IMDb oder Wikipedia.
- ehnto 6y ago
  According to the document, the net worth was unique researched data that is still yet to be accurately replicated. In other words, the company created the data, they did not simply display it. If they were sunk by IMDb copying their data then the data source goes away too, unless IMDb invests in a research team. What happens when CNW goes offline, how will Google replace the now missing data? Remembering that celebrities constantly change net worth and new ones show up every week, so it's a moving target that someone needs to chase.
- tareqak 6y ago
  Crediting the source while providing the information has the same benefit for the user accessing that information, but not the same benefit for website presenting that information. The website loses on whatever benefit a visiting user brings in e.g. advertising revenue, lead-in to a subscription / patronage, a plea for a donation etc. I still remain very much against ads, but I have a more sympathetic take to financing journalism as a result of reading this account. Perhaps just having the headline be free, but having the rest be behind a paywall is a better middle ground?
asah 6y ago
Isn't this a question if just scraping published data? How is this materially different from LinkedIn v hIQ ?
- renlo 6y ago
  NAL, but IIRC it was alleged in the lawsuit that LinkedIn was making a competing product to hiQ. It also seems related to Associated Press vs Meltwater US Holdings, where the AP has developed a network to investigate and promulgate cutting news, and another company was copying parts of the news under "fair use", which was deemed infringement [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_U.S._Holdings,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_....
asah 6y ago
Anti-trust q: how is celebrity net worth "your" business if ~100% of your users came from Google in the first place? Seems to me, you're entitled to lock up the data behind a paywall, and Google is entitled to not send you its users. Google's users can switch search engines.m and some do, e.g. I use duckduckgo for incognito. More to the point, how would regulating Google change any of this? Who would determine a fair price for every piece of information? My sense: to the extent you don't care about the privacy impassioned of CNW, they're a legit value- added service. The exact economic value is somewhere between $0.01 per year and $100B. The free market can be cruel, but it's the best mechanism we have for price optimization. Personally, I'd have pushed back on Google researchers and told them that we know our content is unique, and if they want accurate results, to consider entering into a legit partnership... for example, publish N year old data for free but require captcha/ToS (excluding search engines) for current data. Individual users may not care, but search engines will want the fresh stuff as a competitive matter. Of course, this all assumes there isn't a second CNW competitor with good-enough data, offering it for less than CNW... and if less=free, then too bad CNW... This to me is the weakest link in the CNW business: too easy to gather good enough data cheaply and there's not enough value beyond the basic number e.g. what's the breakdown of CelebrityXs NW, NW over time etc etc - very little market for this premium content. Put another way, i could create a website called "what's the current time in Minsk?" but its economic value would be closer to $.01/yr because it's undifferentiated and there's no premium value, so search engines can and should just display the time. Now let's take weather: in some places the weather is pretty easy (see LA Story, with Steve Martin) and in others (cough nyc cough) the free feeds like NWS are crap and you never know whether to pack an umbrella. Accurate weather for NYC would be amazing value to millions of people and highly differentiated. The problem is that this data is super hard to get - even current data are often wrong! But if by some miracle you had this data, no way would i publish it - instead show that you've got the goods and license it. Google might play cheapskate but the weather apps would pay up and probably uber/lyft, the city of NY etc. Once you've got a few customers then approach Google: this data would be useful across the enterprise. You'd make a killing. But oh yeah, it's really freaking hard (unlike CNW).
jarym 6y ago
I only see one solution: Make Google split the search business out so that it only provides search and nothing else. That was Google's stated 'point' of their own site and they should be held to it. They are like a bad rash, just ripping off from businesses of all sizes and relying on their dominance in search and financial muscle to get away with it. Siphoning off search into its own unit would defang Google's ability to use their search engine dominance to upend others business models and would also reduce the incentives to do such shady things as well.
- mikece 6y ago
  Another solution is to make Google pay for the estimated damages caused to the website (I think it's reasonable to extrapolate growth for a few more years) as well as a massive punitive damage as well because of the callousness and deliberate manner in which they contacted the site owners AND TOLD HIM THEY WOULD TAKE WHAT THEY WANT. I hope Google is forced to pay CNW no less than one billion dollars for this obvious abuse of their position and theft of their content.
skinkestek 6y ago
The scariest thing for Google might be that generally people aren't cheering for them anymore, and many are following them closely to catch them as soon as possible. Compare that to 10 years ago when I and others would cut them 9 yards of slack.
tyingq 6y ago
Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.
- remus 6y ago
  It would depend on how the websites google are collecting data from operate. For example, somewhere like wikipedia isn't harmed through google's re-use of the facts they collate.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    They are if they have less visitors to see their donation requests, stop making enough money and shut down.
  - pkilgore 6y ago
    Wikipedia is directly harmed, in the most definite way, by not being able to collect donations from the people that rely on the information it collects.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Wikipedia's traffic from Google is certainly down. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-visits-in-2019/ https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/how-wikipedia-lost-3-bi...
- klyrs 6y ago
  Once it's too stale, they'll just kill the product. If somebody fills the niche in the future, they can just buy them or scrape them.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Whether it will hurt them before the heat-death of the universe is an open question. On an internet populated entirely by 100 people, it wouldn't take long for shady practices to hurt shady companies. On the internet we have, in which there seems to be an unending supply of people falling over themselves in their eagerness to see their content--any content--displayed on Google's pages for free, the "eventually" in your sentence is doing quite a lot of work.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
> And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build. I remember a few years ago Google had a big blog post about how they’d injected some fake search results to catch Bing scraping like this. It certainly seemed like they thought it was a bad thing back then.
- sidibe 6y ago
  Recently one of the lyrics sites had a similar complaint that might be the same thing happening in this case (and maybe it was the same issue for Bing's case too). If you specify that you don't want Google to take snippets, but a third party ignores the robots.txt or meta tags and has a permissive one of its own Google can just scrape it from there. A missing detail here is what did the textbox for the fake celebrities' net worth on Google link to?
  - jefftk 6y ago
    Playing around with real celebrities: * https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+david+net+worth https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+david+net+worth -> featured snippet from Wikipedia, showing an estimate * https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+net+worth https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+net+worth -> database style response, showing answer with no link
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - giarc 6y ago
    I believe it was Genius that was using rare unicode characters in the lyrics that don't really show up when viewing the page. They were able to see that Google had those same characters in their lyric results and therefore Google was just scraping Genius.
WalterGR 6y ago
Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com http://onlineslangdictionary.com) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, and they knew each other. But that’s incredibly circumstantial. I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive. I’ve written in length about the manual penalty here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/ Edit 0825 Pacific: I have to work. I’ll respond to comments later. You can also reach out directly - contact info is in my profile.
- Craighead 6y ago
  Furtive fallacy in action
- someperson 6y ago
  > Due to the time suck of fighting Google's penalty, this site is not yet served via SSL You probably should get onto enabling SSL/TLS as soon as possible. It supposedly effects search engine ranking.
  - WalterGR 6y ago
    Very true. Due to the penalty, the site gets less and less traffic every year. Enabling SSL/TLS might help a bit, but I have to face facts: the site is dead.
    - badwolf 6y ago
      Not to belittle your experience, but it seems this may be a bit of a negative feedback loop. Haven't updated the homepage because "what's the point I'm already punished" etc...
treszkai 6y ago
Information without DRM can easily become a public good: it can be copied without limits and a loss in quality. Once it's out in the open, people will access it easier, but that also makes it near-impossible for the information-owner to make a living. At the beginning, Google was beneficial to both the information-seekers and the information-owners because it connected them (while showing ads in the search results). With the "featured snippet" it increased the user experience by a little (and multiply this with the user count), while depriving the original owner of information from its entire revenue. (Much like how Spotify made music cheaper for everyone, at the expense of artists.) The nice way to solve this would be if Google gave a cut to CelebrityNetWorth, as Spotify gives to artists. (While Google would bring CNW more requests this way, their price would also be depressed; Spotify doesn't pave the way to the riches. [1]) [1]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-services-rates-2018/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-...
dustingetz 6y ago
Surely they can find a stronger example than a spammy SEO business that didn't exist before google, couldn't exist without and doesn't exist after? Google sucks now but not finding this compelling
- calcifer 6y ago
  Why would the nature of the business be relevant to a House committee hearing? CNW is not on trial here.
- pkilgore 6y ago
  Why does it matter? Do some people not get the protection of laws? Do some people not get representation before elected bodies? Who decides?
tomduncalf 6y ago
"The Featured Snippet also incorporated images of the celebrity scraped from the web to create a widget that took up 40% of a desktop result page and 80% of a mobile result page. This is still how Google displays most net worth results today" FWIW I tried "larry david net worth" and "craig david net worth" on Google from the UK and didn't get this result - Larry David was a snippet from Wikipedia, clearly attributed, and Craig David was from CNW, again clearly attributed - basically an oversize search result with the relevant bit highlighted. Not sure if this is a recent change in response to this or not
sjg007 6y ago
I am not sure why copyright law doesn't apply? Also celebrity net worth should create a trademark net worth which is obviously an approximation of the true net worth. That's different than a sports fact.. But still I don't see why copyright law doesn't apply if Google is directly sourcing material.
havelhovel 6y ago
People are saying this was a bad business model, but looking at the numbers it clearly wasn’t—-unless we’re also acknowledging that the bad part of the model was relying on Google to stay true to its stated policies.
dmcbrayer 6y ago
There's evidence of Google engaging in similar behavior with regard to song lyrics on Genius.com: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-stole-lyrics-morse-code-848781/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-... I think the points about people voluntarily building their businesses on Google's platform, and being thus beholden to Google's whims are well-made. The law, as it exists, doesn't seem to prevent that kind of thing since they're all private businesses, and this behavior benefits the consumer (arguably) even if it does hurt other businesses. Antitrust law (in the US) seems ill-prepared for the 21st century. I tend to get interested in the policy concerns. Is web search so important that it should be considered a public utility, and thus regulated by the government? I think there's a case to be made there.
alex_young 6y ago
I searched for a couple of celebrities, and in one case celebritynetworth.com is the top result, in the other it is the third result. Both queries show info boxes with the estimated net worth, both cite other pages (no link to celebritynetworth.com), and one showed another number than celebritynetworth.com. celebritynetworth.com has a robots.txt. This file has no restriction on Google or any other bot. Each celebrity page seems to have the following meta tag: <meta name=googlebot content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1"> Given the above, it seems like Google is correctly listing celebritynetworth.com high in it's rankings, and using other resources for the info box, which is what celebritynetworth.com is asking them to do. While it's hard to speculate about what happened in the past, it looks like Google is doing the correct thing now, and that this information isn't actually so novel in general.
not2b 6y ago
Many commenters are interpreting this as strictly a matter of copyright violation, and are asking the question of whether facts can be copyrighted. But that's too narrow a way of looking at this; there's also antitrust law. If Google scrapes everything interesting off of other sites and presents it as their own, even if it finds a way to do this that does not violate copyright, it's anti-competitive behavior that may violate antitrust law. (I'm not addressing the European database protection rules which may also apply).
iJohnDoe 6y ago
I think many would be surprised at the trivial and childish changes that Google does to hurt web sites. Many don’t speak out for fear of further being punished by Google.
ardy42 6y ago
> When pressed, the Google team said it would be good exposure for our brand. Offering to pay people in exposure is a really slimy attempt at exploitation, full stop.
redm 6y ago
I think this quote is the most interesting in the testimony: In June 2019, search engine analyst Rand Fishkin put together a report about Google using data from web analytics firm Jumpshot. The data show that today an estimated 48.96% of all Google searches end with the searcher NOT clicking through to a website. The same report estimates that 7% of all search clicks go to a paid ad result and 12% go to properties owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Moreover, those stats do not even show the full extent of the problem because the data largely relied upon desktop devices and could not track searches that took users to a Google-owned app like the YouTube or Google Maps.
rjkennedy98 6y ago
> Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse A lot of talk here about the scrapping and capturing of the ad revenue, but I thought this was the most scary part. It’s one thing to capture ad revenue from SEO companies, it’s another thing to act like the mob and start taking retribution against anyone that speaks out against you.
- Wheaties466 6y ago
  I think thats the point of a monopoly. They have such a large overarching reach that they don't need to respond in a direct way that could be proved to be retribution. They respond in another avenue that affects your business in another platform they control, in ways they don't have to explain.
dave_aiello 6y ago
The impression I got from reading comments here is that CelebrityNetWorth.com isn't much more than a compilation of net worth figures in a database. I don't think this is a fair analysis of the holistic value of that website. For instance, when I look at the analysis of Tim Cook, https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/tim-cook-net-wrth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/t..., who's in the news this week partly because Bloomberg reported that his net worth has reached $1 billion, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-cook-becomes-billionaire-via-the-less-traveled-ceo-route https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-c..., I see the value of CNW's news articles. The CNW news article has a similar value to the analysis that's present in the Bloomberg article reporting on the same thing. In terms of how much of the intrinsic value of CelebrityNetWorth's website Google should be allowed to report directly in its search results, I'd say it would be fair to report CelebrityNetWorth's estimate of a celebrity's net worth so long as Google clearly attributed the data to the site that is their basis, and provided a link to the original information. But in my opinion, the real value of CelebrityNetWorth.com in 2020 is the curated biographical content about the celebrities and their analytical pieces presented in context with their net worth estimates.
DSingularity 6y ago
Wow! Holy smokes. What a terrible company. Oddly enough, as their practices may destroy the internet perhaps they will eventually destroy their own livelihood. Speaking for myself, I no longer search for product reviews and comparisons. Why waste my time when all the content is fake? Probably fake due to the Google search ranking tweaks. Now I go straight to the sellers. What is sad in all this is all the great people that work for such shitty companies and what that implies regarding the state of our morality as computer scientists and engineers.
60secz 6y ago
No moat? Don't be surprised when someone destroys your business model.

435 points by mosiuerbarso 6y ago

I read the statement and think Google used and then and abused their service, but at the same time, publishing a database of people's net worth strikes me as being pretty unethical. Would they have been able to handle a GDPR request? Why didn't they put their own and their families info up there first?

throwaway189262 6y ago
Makes it even sadder that Google now scrapes all of it and provides the information themselves
gberger 6y ago
In Sweden, Finland, and Norway, everyone's income tax records are public. Is that unethical?
- mayankkaizen 6y ago
  My immediate reaction would be, "yes, it is unethical for many reasons". But again, I heard the social welfare system in these countries is best in the world. So may be I shouldn't complain. However, if I don't want to disclose my net worth and if law is on my side in my country, then Google making my data available is definitely wrong.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I would say it is clearly not unethical, but it can still be a bad decision. I would say it is a disadvantage for everyone in low or medium income regions.
- markalexander 6y ago
  Ethical is a bit of a wide term but I’m sure it’s easy to construct situations that are problematic. E.g. an abusive ex partner can check whether you’re likely to have switched job, even from the most basic info. If tax paid is revealed then you can work out what government benefits a person might be on, including those relating to health and disability. Isn’t the implementation in Norway such that the press have special access not afforded to individuals? That also seems pretty questionable.
  - Phaedor 6y ago
    Everyone have access but you have to log in with your ID and the ones you check can see that you checked them. You can check 500 people each month. Your scenario seems pretty far fetched to me since this information will be published in October for the previous year. It contains the income and tax for the whole year only. It would be pretty difficult to know the information you suggest from the limited, delayed records. As a Norwegian I fully support our system with public tax records.
    - op03 6y ago
      Interesting. Hadn't heard about this before. Curious about how it is used by the public. And can businesses login and check too?
      - Phaedor 6y ago
        Arbitrary businesses cannot access it no. However the press can gain special access for a small fee. This means that when the lists are published there are always a lot of news articles about how much various public people earn. There are limitations on how they can use it though, and they cannot publish the whole lists.
        op03 6y ago
        Interesting. Thanks for posting about it.
    - markalexander 6y ago
      I’m not sure how delayed records would stop you working out disability status or any other sensitive status that affects tax paid. The tax regime for any given year is presumably public info. People are notified but that’s hardly going to stop someone seeking to upset you as in the example scenario. Though as I understand the press can do mass lookups with no notification. Don’t you find that disparity concerning? The idea that the government gets to decide what counts as ‘press’ is already something people from countries that don’t operate that way would consider objectionable. Let alone giving them the power to decide who should be 'outed' for their tax affairs. To be fair, that's perhaps more an issue of this particular implementation, rather than fundamental. But it's an example of how it can be used to entrench the establishment.
xlii 6y ago
In the transcribed hearing founder makes it clear that it's more about educated guess based on publicly available information. Net worth and not the owned assets which is completely different number (as celebrities usually have rights to their personal brands which are not transferable). In general this in theory could be challenged, but mostly based on the name and photos and not about inferred information. This might get even worse since a lot of celebrities are using stage names which might be protected as a brand but go unprotected as a personal information.

throwaway189262 6y ago

And yet I constantly get CAPTCHA's just from blocking tracking cookies. The biggest scraper of them all goes to incredible lengths to prevent scraping. How ironic. I hope the US govt demolishes these monopolies. It's not just in web either, the closest historical precedent I can think of is the Robber Barons of the 30's

ehnto 6y ago
It's them protecting their technology moat I figure, not so ironic, more of a hoarder protecting their hoard.
Google234 6y ago
There’s a thing called a robot.txt.
- xondono 6y ago
  Yes, and google has been observed several times to ignore the robots.txt file
  - Google234 6y ago
    No, this is true in general. Maybe there’s been some bugs (I would be surprised, can you link these multiple examples?) but Google respects robot.txt files
- pkilgore 6y ago
  Even assuming Google would not ignore that for a popular enough site (they would know!), there is no robot.txt setting that says "index my site, but please don't steal my content, thanks."
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Yeah then they won't index you at all and you lose all your traffic instantly. How about a setting to index my site without scaping my content and using it all over the place without attribution

j88439h84 6y ago

> Are everyday consumers harmed by Google’s practices YES How are consumers harmed by Google presenting extracted data in an infobox? Isn't it more convenient?

redslazer 6y ago
The consumer is harmed because there is no one incentivised to create new content, or at least the incentives are severely diminished. In the story here the celebrity net worth data had to be created and this was worth doing due to the ad revenue. Making the existing data available to consumer is a benefit but the negative is the lack of new content. So now consumer have easier access to old, inaccurate data.
dunnock 6y ago
I think what author said is explained in the article, as that such approach undermines small businesses which provide informational services. They won't be able to hire data analysts and researchers anymore, hence quality of information in info boxes will decline as information gets outdated. In other words Google is stealing data presenting as it's own taking all the benefits of embedding ads data
mdoms 6y ago
Is convenience the only axis that we care about now?
zeepzeep 6y ago
You don't get the traffic -> you don't earn money (google does).
the_gipsy 6y ago
In this instance, yes, it's convenient for the user. In the global scheme of things, it kills innovation and competition, so that hurts the end user.

lalaland1125 6y ago

I think Google is in the right here. Facts are not protected by copyright and they shouldn't be. Imagine being able to copyright the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. It would be a disaster.

sunnyam 6y ago
Have you read the written statement? He says that it's not commodity information like the height of a building or the the current time. Just like Forbes, they employed a team of fact-checkers to find and generate estimates. Knowing the exact net worth of a celebrity isn't just a fact that someone can determine and so for Google to steal that information, which is the result of research and scrutiny is wrong.
onion2k 6y ago
Some things are facts, like the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. But other things aren't facts, and where something isn't a fact but instead is implicit knowledge derived from a set of both data and assumptions (like a model or an algorithm) Google should absolutely not be taking that data and treating it as their own. Given the PDF includes this quote "I decided to build a company that attempted to make educated guesses based on the sourcing of a full-time research team." I think we can assume that the data on CelebrityNetWorth wasn't "facts". However, even if CelebrityNetWorth's data were facts, I don't believe Google should be able allowed to replicate the work that people have put in to building a website that lists facts. Google could, and eventually probably will, replace every fact based website with a sidebar in their results page. People can't compete with that. That's using Google's (de facto) search results monopoly to stop people searching the web. That's making the web worse. That's stifling innovation. I might be able to dream up some way of using CelebrityNetWorth data to improve the world (somehow...), and Google would be stopping that. The engineers who work at Google need to stop ruining the web by trying to turn it in to their own walled garden.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  This is interesting. The final outcome could be that CNW shuts down. Then, the data won’t be updated. So then google will have to drop the info box. And then someone will come along with an idea to track the net worth of celebrities... Has Google set up some kind of hysteresis that results in the long term, repeated building and subsequent crushing of data aggregation companies?

dunnock 6y ago

You would not expect of such big business to behave in a different way. What we consumers can do is to try to use alternative services where we can, e.g. I am happy with using Firefox instead of Chrome

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jtxx 6y ago
same + duckduckgo & protonmail

errantmind 6y ago

It looks more like an ethical argument than a legal one. I don't understand how this data would be protected under US law. Can someone explain if you think otherwise? Is the issue that the data was scraped? Or is the issue Google appropriated the scraped data for use in their search results? From my perspective it just looks like a bad business model: spend a lot of time and effort estimating net worth, and then publish it on the open web. Publicly available data can be freely and legally scraped (and I wouldn't want it any other way): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

philprx 6y ago
It's the business model of many online blogs and sites, and get payment through ads. Of course it's not a really strong model now that ads revenue are going down. It was a strong one not so long ago. Now it's clearly IPR theft, present it how you like, but theft is theft. Plus it's not really smart from Google given their prior contact and request to this company on APIs and providing it for free. Now the real question: Is Google going to go away with it blaming it on "rogue employee" and continuing on dispensing huge sum of cash and free advisory to gov and internet NGOs in their constant advocacy effort...
- errantmind 6y ago
  >> Now it's clearly IPR theft, present it how you like, but theft is theft. I don't quite see the legal basis for it being theft. Can you explain?
  - philprx 6y ago
    IANAL: 1. Google doesn't show in-line'd data box with Net worth 2. Google asks site (CNW) for access, is denied. 3. Google then shows site's data in data box (with CNW site proof of theft with canary tokens being the fake celebrity's net worth) that are now presented as Google's data (no source or fake source), without license from original site. If that isn't theft of data, what is it? From the PDFs, there is no license for free re-use ;-) While I'm all-in for freedom of information and open source documentation license or open data licenses, I fully understand the need of businesses to protect their intellectual property and rights.

philprx 6y ago

"Don't be evil" ;-) Is it still Google's motto?

InfinityByTen 6y ago
They deprecated that years ago.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Gotta say, I preferred Google v1.0. The subsequent patches suck.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    Android, Chromium and Kubernetes have come a long way. Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.
    - tester34 6y ago
      >Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. Is it even true? MS does a lot of open source
      - techntoke 6y ago
        Yes if you compare the code base size and the core components. Microsoft still hasn't open sourced it's main consumer operating system and neither has Apple.
        perseusmandate 6y ago
        Not a valid comparison since those are core products of both companies. Google hasn't and never will open source Search.

gundmc 6y ago

Out of curiosity, I tried searching a number of "$X Net Worth Queries" to see how it looks today. Snoop Dogg, Mike Trout, Will Smith. For each I got an infobox sourced from Wikipedia or a news article and Celebrity Net Worth was somewhere in the top 1-3 organic results.

philprx 6y ago
When you consider the impact/cost of an anti-trust case vs. the ease for Google to change rankings so that the evidence site (CNW) is back in the top 3 results... Of course you would do that if you were Google... And here there's nothing illegal, it would just defuse more journalistic bombs for Google. Smart move.

system2 6y ago

I felt sad reading the whole thing. I searched "will smith net worth" and after wikipedia snippet, the first result was celebrity net worth. CNW depends on google, uses them to make money. Google is a search tool and wants to show whatever results makes users happy. CNW can simply remove itself from the platform and tell google never to use their data. It almost sounds like CNW is trying to bite the hand of only company made them something. I feel bad for CNW but this is natural. I've seen many of my and my clients' sites go rock bottom because of google updates. "Google Stole My Business" sounds harsh. More like "google doesn't do what I want them to do." CNW was nothing before google. Maybe CNW could make technical changes to their content the way wallpaper/graphics sites made changes after google image search updates.

huffmsa 6y ago
"Google Takes My Data and Presents It as Their Own" a better title for you?
- system2 6y ago
  No of course not. My point is that google will change things as they did in the past. The way google snippet works is simple, they scan the data and sum it up. I searched multiple results right now. "bill gates net worth" data was taken from Wikipedia and CNW didn't even exist on the first page. "Beyonce net worth" showed a detailed snippet for businessinsider, and second link was CNW. Same for Eminem, 210M from groovewallet, and second result was CNW. I just couldn't find what CNW is complaining about.
  - huffmsa 6y ago
    And the wikipedia page cites https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=billionaires#46f7f1c3689f https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=billionaires... As the source for Bill Gates' net worth. Why can a free, community edited website successfully attribute it's sources but a trillion dollar company cannot?
    - 6y ago

renewiltord 6y ago

Information wants to be free, man.

philprx 6y ago
Yes, that's OK if it's symmetrical: why can't we easily automate Google search results? It's asymetry here that is the problem, not Information Freedom. And i'm pretty sure this is the line/dark pattern Google is hoping for: that people give credit to Google for "Information Freedom"... missing the real issue.
tommilukkarinen 6y ago
Obviously it is not just about information, but anything they can scrape bucks out of. If it were a service they could copy, they would. Meaning probably your job as well. So fine, they copy it and you are fine with it, you still offer a premium and theirs is a cheap copy and you have a business. But in addition, to maximize profits, they also somehow prevent you selling your service. Like they did here by hiding visibility. Meaning that they don't just offer same kind of thing, but prevent anyone buying anything but their own product. And you will keep thinking this will happen to someone else, until it happens to you. It just starts from artists, writers, etc. whose work happens to be easy to copy with the current technology.

praveen9920 6y ago

I'm not sure if this is ethical and legal problem. But one thing for sure is Google has too much leverage both technically and financially. Google has slowly increased the reliability on Google for consumers everywhere that they are essentially a monopoly which is bad for the market. It is about time a new player comes into picture with same user interface and different business model which can empower these internet entrepreneurs.

techntoke 6y ago
The same could be said for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. At least Google open sources their operating system, browser and are mostly responsible for Kubernetes. If people are going to have such high expectations of one company why do they not equally apply the judgement.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  There is also similar problems with all those companies too, not sure why you think that is some kind of defence of Google.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    Because those companies are ignored while everyone jumps aboard the Google hate train, and if anything is going to be done to fix it then those changes need to be applied equally to all companies at the same time. Otherwise it does more harm than good.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      People complain about the actions of all those companies quite regularly, Google isn't a victim here.

teddyh 6y ago

The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its disposal to significantly harm or snuff out a rival. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our organic rankings have continued to suffer since I’ve become a vocal critic of their practices. Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse. As a result we were also banned from using the Google’s dominant Ad Mob mobile ad platform. This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.

ehnto 6y ago
Well we can hope to surface avenues of monopolistic behavior that allow a company to abuse their position within the confines of the law through committees like this. Just because it follows the letter of the law doesn't mean it's not malicious or damaging.
tareqak 6y ago
> And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build. A number might not be copyrightable, but what about a news article? What would happen if all the world’s new sites just denied the Google crawler using robots.txt? What if they also returned 404s if accessed from an IP address known to be owned by Google?
- Jefff8 6y ago
  Databases have protection under EU law. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-databases https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-dat... The EU is also interested in Google, and this looks like a slam-dunk case on the face of it.

manish_gill 6y ago

I have Zero respect for the Google engineers and PMs who worked on this project, scraping content without attributing to the original source, and subsequent change in the search ranking of the original source. A very bad taste in the mouth indeed.

dimsumsumdim 6y ago
I am not trying to defend Google or its practices. But how is the activity of CNW researchers different from what is Google doing? Unless the author elaborates on their method, "Educated guess" sounds like scrapping content without sourcing the author in the first place.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  AFAIK there's no other database that they scrapped from. Reading sources like news articles, documents etc. is very different from copying the database that someone else created. It's like the difference of tapping Yelp's API and create a competing service and looking at Yelp, Google, Squirespace etc. to create a restorant recommendations website.
  - dimsumsumdim 6y ago
    Humans can also scrap. If CNW employs researchers, they must be using sources. These sources are not referenced in their content. Either CNW is merely making up the net worth figures, or their researchers are pulling data from somewhere to provide information about 25,000+ celebrities. If the second is valid, they aren't that different from what Google is doing.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      I answered your question about how CNW researchers are different. Using sources to create a knowledge base for something is very different than hooking up to a knowledge base that was already curated and displaying it as your own without compensating the people who curated it. Yes, sure. It would be nice of them to disclose their own sources too but I fail to see how this is related to Google straight out copying their curated database and showing it to its own users. Like, why are we discussing it? What is the agenda here? Are we trying to conclude that CNW owners are also not that nice? Are you claiming that CNW copied your own research and demand justice too? If you explain what is your point here, maybe we can have a productive discussion instead of repeating the same stuff.

tehabe 6y ago

An odd witness for the very true issues people have with Google Search. Google is crediting all websites it uses information from. It might be sad for such a site but I wonder how the creator thought that this is sustainable. Sites with biographical data for famous people already existed and for them adding net worth information is easy. So if not Google had kill them, they might have being killed by IMDb oder Wikipedia.

ehnto 6y ago
According to the document, the net worth was unique researched data that is still yet to be accurately replicated. In other words, the company created the data, they did not simply display it. If they were sunk by IMDb copying their data then the data source goes away too, unless IMDb invests in a research team. What happens when CNW goes offline, how will Google replace the now missing data? Remembering that celebrities constantly change net worth and new ones show up every week, so it's a moving target that someone needs to chase.
tareqak 6y ago
Crediting the source while providing the information has the same benefit for the user accessing that information, but not the same benefit for website presenting that information. The website loses on whatever benefit a visiting user brings in e.g. advertising revenue, lead-in to a subscription / patronage, a plea for a donation etc. I still remain very much against ads, but I have a more sympathetic take to financing journalism as a result of reading this account. Perhaps just having the headline be free, but having the rest be behind a paywall is a better middle ground?

asah 6y ago

Isn't this a question if just scraping published data? How is this materially different from LinkedIn v hIQ ?

renlo 6y ago
NAL, but IIRC it was alleged in the lawsuit that LinkedIn was making a competing product to hiQ. It also seems related to Associated Press vs Meltwater US Holdings, where the AP has developed a network to investigate and promulgate cutting news, and another company was copying parts of the news under "fair use", which was deemed infringement [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_U.S._Holdings,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_....

asah 6y ago

Anti-trust q: how is celebrity net worth "your" business if ~100% of your users came from Google in the first place? Seems to me, you're entitled to lock up the data behind a paywall, and Google is entitled to not send you its users. Google's users can switch search engines.m and some do, e.g. I use duckduckgo for incognito. More to the point, how would regulating Google change any of this? Who would determine a fair price for every piece of information? My sense: to the extent you don't care about the privacy impassioned of CNW, they're a legit value- added service. The exact economic value is somewhere between $0.01 per year and $100B. The free market can be cruel, but it's the best mechanism we have for price optimization. Personally, I'd have pushed back on Google researchers and told them that we know our content is unique, and if they want accurate results, to consider entering into a legit partnership... for example, publish N year old data for free but require captcha/ToS (excluding search engines) for current data. Individual users may not care, but search engines will want the fresh stuff as a competitive matter. Of course, this all assumes there isn't a second CNW competitor with good-enough data, offering it for less than CNW... and if less=free, then too bad CNW... This to me is the weakest link in the CNW business: too easy to gather good enough data cheaply and there's not enough value beyond the basic number e.g. what's the breakdown of CelebrityXs NW, NW over time etc etc - very little market for this premium content. Put another way, i could create a website called "what's the current time in Minsk?" but its economic value would be closer to $.01/yr because it's undifferentiated and there's no premium value, so search engines can and should just display the time. Now let's take weather: in some places the weather is pretty easy (see LA Story, with Steve Martin) and in others (cough nyc cough) the free feeds like NWS are crap and you never know whether to pack an umbrella. Accurate weather for NYC would be amazing value to millions of people and highly differentiated. The problem is that this data is super hard to get - even current data are often wrong! But if by some miracle you had this data, no way would i publish it - instead show that you've got the goods and license it. Google might play cheapskate but the weather apps would pay up and probably uber/lyft, the city of NY etc. Once you've got a few customers then approach Google: this data would be useful across the enterprise. You'd make a killing. But oh yeah, it's really freaking hard (unlike CNW).

jarym 6y ago

I only see one solution: Make Google split the search business out so that it only provides search and nothing else. That was Google's stated 'point' of their own site and they should be held to it. They are like a bad rash, just ripping off from businesses of all sizes and relying on their dominance in search and financial muscle to get away with it. Siphoning off search into its own unit would defang Google's ability to use their search engine dominance to upend others business models and would also reduce the incentives to do such shady things as well.

mikece 6y ago
Another solution is to make Google pay for the estimated damages caused to the website (I think it's reasonable to extrapolate growth for a few more years) as well as a massive punitive damage as well because of the callousness and deliberate manner in which they contacted the site owners AND TOLD HIM THEY WOULD TAKE WHAT THEY WANT. I hope Google is forced to pay CNW no less than one billion dollars for this obvious abuse of their position and theft of their content.

skinkestek 6y ago

The scariest thing for Google might be that generally people aren't cheering for them anymore, and many are following them closely to catch them as soon as possible. Compare that to 10 years ago when I and others would cut them 9 yards of slack.

tyingq 6y ago

Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.

remus 6y ago
It would depend on how the websites google are collecting data from operate. For example, somewhere like wikipedia isn't harmed through google's re-use of the facts they collate.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  They are if they have less visitors to see their donation requests, stop making enough money and shut down.
- pkilgore 6y ago
  Wikipedia is directly harmed, in the most definite way, by not being able to collect donations from the people that rely on the information it collects.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Wikipedia's traffic from Google is certainly down. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/how-wikipedia-lost-3-billion-visits-in-2019/ https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/how-wikipedia-lost-3-bi...
klyrs 6y ago
Once it's too stale, they'll just kill the product. If somebody fills the niche in the future, they can just buy them or scrape them.
pwinnski 6y ago
Whether it will hurt them before the heat-death of the universe is an open question. On an internet populated entirely by 100 people, it wouldn't take long for shady practices to hurt shady companies. On the internet we have, in which there seems to be an unending supply of people falling over themselves in their eagerness to see their content--any content--displayed on Google's pages for free, the "eventually" in your sentence is doing quite a lot of work.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

> And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build. I remember a few years ago Google had a big blog post about how they’d injected some fake search results to catch Bing scraping like this. It certainly seemed like they thought it was a bad thing back then.

sidibe 6y ago
Recently one of the lyrics sites had a similar complaint that might be the same thing happening in this case (and maybe it was the same issue for Bing's case too). If you specify that you don't want Google to take snippets, but a third party ignores the robots.txt or meta tags and has a permissive one of its own Google can just scrape it from there. A missing detail here is what did the textbox for the fake celebrities' net worth on Google link to?
- jefftk 6y ago
  Playing around with real celebrities: * https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+david+net+worth https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+david+net+worth -> featured snippet from Wikipedia, showing an estimate * https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+net+worth https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+net+worth -> database style response, showing answer with no link
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- giarc 6y ago
  I believe it was Genius that was using rare unicode characters in the lyrics that don't really show up when viewing the page. They were able to see that Google had those same characters in their lyric results and therefore Google was just scraping Genius.

WalterGR 6y ago

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com http://onlineslangdictionary.com) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, and they knew each other. But that’s incredibly circumstantial. I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive. I’ve written in length about the manual penalty here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/ Edit 0825 Pacific: I have to work. I’ll respond to comments later. You can also reach out directly - contact info is in my profile.

Craighead 6y ago
Furtive fallacy in action
someperson 6y ago
> Due to the time suck of fighting Google's penalty, this site is not yet served via SSL You probably should get onto enabling SSL/TLS as soon as possible. It supposedly effects search engine ranking.
- WalterGR 6y ago
  Very true. Due to the penalty, the site gets less and less traffic every year. Enabling SSL/TLS might help a bit, but I have to face facts: the site is dead.
  - badwolf 6y ago
    Not to belittle your experience, but it seems this may be a bit of a negative feedback loop. Haven't updated the homepage because "what's the point I'm already punished" etc...

treszkai 6y ago

Information without DRM can easily become a public good: it can be copied without limits and a loss in quality. Once it's out in the open, people will access it easier, but that also makes it near-impossible for the information-owner to make a living. At the beginning, Google was beneficial to both the information-seekers and the information-owners because it connected them (while showing ads in the search results). With the "featured snippet" it increased the user experience by a little (and multiply this with the user count), while depriving the original owner of information from its entire revenue. (Much like how Spotify made music cheaper for everyone, at the expense of artists.) The nice way to solve this would be if Google gave a cut to CelebrityNetWorth, as Spotify gives to artists. (While Google would bring CNW more requests this way, their price would also be depressed; Spotify doesn't pave the way to the riches. [1]) [1]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-services-rates-2018/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-...

dustingetz 6y ago

Surely they can find a stronger example than a spammy SEO business that didn't exist before google, couldn't exist without and doesn't exist after? Google sucks now but not finding this compelling

calcifer 6y ago
Why would the nature of the business be relevant to a House committee hearing? CNW is not on trial here.
pkilgore 6y ago
Why does it matter? Do some people not get the protection of laws? Do some people not get representation before elected bodies? Who decides?

tomduncalf 6y ago

"The Featured Snippet also incorporated images of the celebrity scraped from the web to create a widget that took up 40% of a desktop result page and 80% of a mobile result page. This is still how Google displays most net worth results today" FWIW I tried "larry david net worth" and "craig david net worth" on Google from the UK and didn't get this result - Larry David was a snippet from Wikipedia, clearly attributed, and Craig David was from CNW, again clearly attributed - basically an oversize search result with the relevant bit highlighted. Not sure if this is a recent change in response to this or not

sjg007 6y ago

I am not sure why copyright law doesn't apply? Also celebrity net worth should create a trademark net worth which is obviously an approximation of the true net worth. That's different than a sports fact.. But still I don't see why copyright law doesn't apply if Google is directly sourcing material.

havelhovel 6y ago

People are saying this was a bad business model, but looking at the numbers it clearly wasn’t—-unless we’re also acknowledging that the bad part of the model was relying on Google to stay true to its stated policies.

dmcbrayer 6y ago

There's evidence of Google engaging in similar behavior with regard to song lyrics on Genius.com: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-stole-lyrics-morse-code-848781/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-... I think the points about people voluntarily building their businesses on Google's platform, and being thus beholden to Google's whims are well-made. The law, as it exists, doesn't seem to prevent that kind of thing since they're all private businesses, and this behavior benefits the consumer (arguably) even if it does hurt other businesses. Antitrust law (in the US) seems ill-prepared for the 21st century. I tend to get interested in the policy concerns. Is web search so important that it should be considered a public utility, and thus regulated by the government? I think there's a case to be made there.

alex_young 6y ago

I searched for a couple of celebrities, and in one case celebritynetworth.com is the top result, in the other it is the third result. Both queries show info boxes with the estimated net worth, both cite other pages (no link to celebritynetworth.com), and one showed another number than celebritynetworth.com. celebritynetworth.com has a robots.txt. This file has no restriction on Google or any other bot. Each celebrity page seems to have the following meta tag: <meta name=googlebot content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1"> Given the above, it seems like Google is correctly listing celebritynetworth.com high in it's rankings, and using other resources for the info box, which is what celebritynetworth.com is asking them to do. While it's hard to speculate about what happened in the past, it looks like Google is doing the correct thing now, and that this information isn't actually so novel in general.

not2b 6y ago

Many commenters are interpreting this as strictly a matter of copyright violation, and are asking the question of whether facts can be copyrighted. But that's too narrow a way of looking at this; there's also antitrust law. If Google scrapes everything interesting off of other sites and presents it as their own, even if it finds a way to do this that does not violate copyright, it's anti-competitive behavior that may violate antitrust law. (I'm not addressing the European database protection rules which may also apply).

iJohnDoe 6y ago

I think many would be surprised at the trivial and childish changes that Google does to hurt web sites. Many don’t speak out for fear of further being punished by Google.

ardy42 6y ago

> When pressed, the Google team said it would be good exposure for our brand. Offering to pay people in exposure is a really slimy attempt at exploitation, full stop.

redm 6y ago

I think this quote is the most interesting in the testimony: In June 2019, search engine analyst Rand Fishkin put together a report about Google using data from web analytics firm Jumpshot. The data show that today an estimated 48.96% of all Google searches end with the searcher NOT clicking through to a website. The same report estimates that 7% of all search clicks go to a paid ad result and 12% go to properties owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Moreover, those stats do not even show the full extent of the problem because the data largely relied upon desktop devices and could not track searches that took users to a Google-owned app like the YouTube or Google Maps.

rjkennedy98 6y ago

> Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse A lot of talk here about the scrapping and capturing of the ad revenue, but I thought this was the most scary part. It’s one thing to capture ad revenue from SEO companies, it’s another thing to act like the mob and start taking retribution against anyone that speaks out against you.

Wheaties466 6y ago
I think thats the point of a monopoly. They have such a large overarching reach that they don't need to respond in a direct way that could be proved to be retribution. They respond in another avenue that affects your business in another platform they control, in ways they don't have to explain.

dave_aiello 6y ago

The impression I got from reading comments here is that CelebrityNetWorth.com isn't much more than a compilation of net worth figures in a database. I don't think this is a fair analysis of the holistic value of that website. For instance, when I look at the analysis of Tim Cook, https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/tim-cook-net-wrth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/t..., who's in the news this week partly because Bloomberg reported that his net worth has reached $1 billion, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-cook-becomes-billionaire-via-the-less-traveled-ceo-route https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-c..., I see the value of CNW's news articles. The CNW news article has a similar value to the analysis that's present in the Bloomberg article reporting on the same thing. In terms of how much of the intrinsic value of CelebrityNetWorth's website Google should be allowed to report directly in its search results, I'd say it would be fair to report CelebrityNetWorth's estimate of a celebrity's net worth so long as Google clearly attributed the data to the site that is their basis, and provided a link to the original information. But in my opinion, the real value of CelebrityNetWorth.com in 2020 is the curated biographical content about the celebrities and their analytical pieces presented in context with their net worth estimates.

DSingularity 6y ago

Wow! Holy smokes. What a terrible company. Oddly enough, as their practices may destroy the internet perhaps they will eventually destroy their own livelihood. Speaking for myself, I no longer search for product reviews and comparisons. Why waste my time when all the content is fake? Probably fake due to the Google search ranking tweaks. Now I go straight to the sellers. What is sad in all this is all the great people that work for such shitty companies and what that implies regarding the state of our morality as computer scientists and engineers.

60secz 6y ago

No moat? Don't be surprised when someone destroys your business model.