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I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites and sometimes it’ll embed a whole YouTube player. If a

I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites and sometimes it’ll embed a whole YouTube player. If anything, it’s good that they feature content from not-YouTube. The “quality” of TikTok videos is not really important here because one might actually look for them.

stingraycharles 6y ago
Isn’t this against the license of those sites, though? I’m pretty sure you’re absolutely not allowed to crawl Instagram content let alone mirror their videos.
- judge2020 6y ago
  You implicitly give a license to crawlers if you don’t take action to block them via robots.txt or otherwise block them via your server. If you do either of these, google will respect the site’s decision and you probably could take them to court if they tried to evade blockers that block google bot (but since google always respects robots.txt and never craws from a different ASN or different user agent, even for safe browsing crawls, they’re fine). So if Instagram wants to block google from downloading their videos, they can Disallow: /video/ (Or however their url scheme works)
  - simple_phrases 6y ago
    Pretty sure crawling and scraping is legal even if there's a robots.txt.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      As long as it’s public. If you need to bypass auth or similar, that’ll get you in trouble. 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...
- bamboleo 6y ago
  I would assume Google isn’t just gonna try to start needless fights with Facebook’s lawyers, so it’s likely legal.
ehsankia 6y ago
A more close example is how there's a Tweet carousel that can sometimes show up. I personally find that very useful. This is no different from that.
gcb0 6y ago
> I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites No, Google have never promoted video from other sites, only youtube. And they got away with it because to most users, video is youtube indeed. Now that they have competition, that youtube cannot compete, they decided to give in and finally show video on their searches. And that is shocking everyone in this thread. Google is a monopoly worse than microsoft.

stingraycharles 6y ago

Isn’t this against the license of those sites, though? I’m pretty sure you’re absolutely not allowed to crawl Instagram content let alone mirror their videos.

judge2020 6y ago
You implicitly give a license to crawlers if you don’t take action to block them via robots.txt or otherwise block them via your server. If you do either of these, google will respect the site’s decision and you probably could take them to court if they tried to evade blockers that block google bot (but since google always respects robots.txt and never craws from a different ASN or different user agent, even for safe browsing crawls, they’re fine). So if Instagram wants to block google from downloading their videos, they can Disallow: /video/ (Or however their url scheme works)
- simple_phrases 6y ago
  Pretty sure crawling and scraping is legal even if there's a robots.txt.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    As long as it’s public. If you need to bypass auth or similar, that’ll get you in trouble. 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...
bamboleo 6y ago
I would assume Google isn’t just gonna try to start needless fights with Facebook’s lawyers, so it’s likely legal.

ehsankia 6y ago

A more close example is how there's a Tweet carousel that can sometimes show up. I personally find that very useful. This is no different from that.

gcb0 6y ago

> I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites No, Google have never promoted video from other sites, only youtube. And they got away with it because to most users, video is youtube indeed. Now that they have competition, that youtube cannot compete, they decided to give in and finally show video on their searches. And that is shocking everyone in this thread. Google is a monopoly worse than microsoft.