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FTA: 'In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news s

FTA: 'In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news story headlines, not brief excerpts from articles, would bring it into compliance with the new law.' The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results (without permission). They do this with all sorts of other stuff too, news sites aren't the only ones who get irritated by it.

rognjen 6y ago
> lifting content from the article wholesale From your quote: > brief excerpts
- kevingadd 6y ago
  brief excerpts are content, my friend. If they weren't, readers wouldn't care about them and Google would have no reason to go through the trouble of scraping them and inserting them into search results.
  - rognjen 6y ago
    Excerpts are definitely content. They're definitely not wholesale.
jasode 6y ago
>The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results (without permission). Yes, but your full quoted text further explains that even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance. We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it. I don't understand that logic. They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google but also want to be paid for it?!? If after a Apple WWDC event, the front page of HN is filled with url links to Apple press releases and announcements, it doesn't mean HN should pay money to Apple Inc to send eyeballs to "apple.com". Linking to other urls (for free) is how the web works. IMO, removing the embedded snippets should have been enough.
tpxl 6y ago
> they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results How is this not straight up copyright infringement? Or have the sites agreed to it and are now just being whiny babies?
- dontblink 6y ago
  The latter. It's ridiculous. I wish Google had not caved.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  The sites always had an opt-out of being scraped, via robots.txt. Google made a special-case change for French news sites where they stopped showing snippets, and just showed URLs (still opt-outable via robots.txt). The complaint was just a pretext to force Google to pay protection money against the spirit of the law, as if France is some failed-state thug-government like Libya or something.

rognjen 6y ago

> lifting content from the article wholesale From your quote: > brief excerpts

kevingadd 6y ago
brief excerpts are content, my friend. If they weren't, readers wouldn't care about them and Google would have no reason to go through the trouble of scraping them and inserting them into search results.
- rognjen 6y ago
  Excerpts are definitely content. They're definitely not wholesale.

jasode 6y ago

>The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results (without permission). Yes, but your full quoted text further explains that even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance. We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it. I don't understand that logic. They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google but also want to be paid for it?!? If after a Apple WWDC event, the front page of HN is filled with url links to Apple press releases and announcements, it doesn't mean HN should pay money to Apple Inc to send eyeballs to "apple.com". Linking to other urls (for free) is how the web works. IMO, removing the embedded snippets should have been enough.

tpxl 6y ago

> they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results How is this not straight up copyright infringement? Or have the sites agreed to it and are now just being whiny babies?

dontblink 6y ago
The latter. It's ridiculous. I wish Google had not caved.
wutbrodo 6y ago
The sites always had an opt-out of being scraped, via robots.txt. Google made a special-case change for French news sites where they stopped showing snippets, and just showed URLs (still opt-outable via robots.txt). The complaint was just a pretext to force Google to pay protection money against the spirit of the law, as if France is some failed-state thug-government like Libya or something.