4 ms·

> Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors That's not neccessarily true. Without a search engine, those sites would lose the major

• MaKey 6y ago
  That's true. However, I fail to see moral wrongdoings by Google in the case of news publishers.
  • liveoneggs 6y ago
    mostly stealing their content in various ways and not compensating them for it
  • kortilla 6y ago
    You don’t see an issue with google scraping news contents out of the news articles and displaying a large snippet in the search results that eliminates 90% of the potential visitors?
    • mrep 6y ago
      If they don't want google to display a snippet, then they can "Use the nosnippet meta tag to prevent Google from displaying a snippet for your page in Search results, or use the max-snippet:[number] meta tag to specify the maximum length for your result snippets. You can also prevent certain parts of the page text content from being shown in a snippet by using data-nosnippet". [0] [0]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
      • sildur 6y ago
        That’s playing Google’s game. Where today you “simply” have to do X, which tomorrow will be X plus Y but not Z, and so on. What about Google don’t stealing content by default unless I add a meta tag named yes-google-steal-my-content?
        • theamk 6y ago
          I saw the earliest reference to "nosnippet" in 2007, 13 years ago. Those things are not changing that fast at all.
    • elpool2 6y ago
      Did Google change how they do this recently? Because I'm not seeing what you describe. All I see is a headline and an image without any snippet at all.
• bilbo0s 6y ago
  Just Devil's Advocate, but how would a pure search engine make money without doing what Google does? Let's suppose a hypothetical Google alternative just purely distributes clicks to organic results. Where does the money to pay for its operation come from? Serious question. I honestly believe that one of the flaws of the current form of the internet is the need for a search engine.
  • senko 6y ago
    That's a false dichotomy. As the GP pointed out, Google started with a symbiotic relationship with the websites. Scraping the content and using it to help people find stuff (and profiting handsomely!) is not the problem. Problem is all other behavior highlighted by GP - pushing organic results below fold, insta-answers totally stopping traffic to sites actually providing that content, and so on. Google is now using its dominant position in search engine market to effectively bundle search with these other things that negatively impact publishers into an "all or nothing" deal. "Don't want us to scrape and show your data? You have nice traffic to your page, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
    • cromwellian 6y ago
      Users want snippets, they want instant answers tho. Just serving 10-blue links, no summary snippet, that forces you to click through and read the page before deciding if it was relevant to you, costs the user both time and bandwidth. If the article is not what I wanted, then you wasted a few seconds of my time that I will never get back, and if I have a metered internet connection, you forced me to load up a lot of junk, eating into my bill, for naught. If I want to look up the current time, or current temperature, or how old Trump is, I don't want to have to be directed to his biography page at the Whitehouse.gov, where I then must skim-read several paragraphs to find it. People are saying "but they're not getting the traffic". Well, facts are not copyrightable, and if all I'm looking for is a small specific fact (answer), then I wasn't interested in a full pageview of your site anyway. Let's say a put 8 hours into writing a programming blog, on say Kotlin, with tutorials and stuff, and someone searches for a question about "which library contains atomics"?, am I supposed to be mad that it answered back "atomicfu" instead of forcing you to read an entire tutorial on Atomicfu I wrote? If the searcher wanted to read a tutorial on atomics, that's what he would have searched for, and likely, he will go examine this library, and then search further about how to use it. To me, the future of search engines is an AI, like GPT-3, that goes out and digests the world, and then lets me ask questions, which it will synthesize brief answers to exactly what I want. In this world, the news publishers will face the same problem of demonetization, and people will be asking their GPT-5 bot "can you summarize what happened yesterday around COVID-19 and the Whitehouse?" News is facing a serous pressure now, but is the right answer to attack summarization technology? It seems it's inevitable that content will be understood and transformed by machines in ways that will be hard to litigate by copyright claims if they spew out original work, and therefore the real question is, in a future of Star Trek like search engines, how can news's basic business model and incentives be transformed? Personally, I agree with Andrew Yang on this, I think a lot of publishing is going to go open source and non-profit, funded by government grants as a basic necessity of democracy, like healthcare, or universal education.