5 ms·

If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again. Which I think says a lot about how Goo

If Google ever started including copy-pasteable code from Stack Overflow, I might never follow a link from Google again. Which I think says a lot about how Google is used now. I don't use Google to find web pages, I use it to find an answer to a pressing question. When I'm looking for something to read, I go to a content aggregator like HN or Reddit. Of course this isn't sustainable. If Google is just presenting other sites' data "for" them, and thus depriving them of traffic and revenue, eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping. Long term, this seems self-defeating for Google, just as its ruinous to the sites they scrape.

californical 6y ago
I don’t know about Google, but I’ve gotten relevant Stack Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  But so few people use DDG. It probably isn’t much of an issue for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is that stack overflow would feel it.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    So, do you think it's fine that DDG is doing it? Is the act itself bad, or only the outcome it has due to Google's marketshare?
tasogare 6y ago
I don’t particularly like the press, but as a profession they recognized quickly the danger of Google displaying directly their content on the results page. Too bad they fought only for themselves and not for the web in general, since they’re holding enough power to tip the scale.
shadowgovt 6y ago
> eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't arise to replace the old.
freebuju 6y ago
I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For individual content owners as well.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Generally the price of information is race to the bottom, people shouldn't be expected to get payed anymore. I'm happy to pay for content: I pay for Youtube and Netflix, and they pay content creators. I'm also buying books on Kindle. But when I signed up for the Economist, what I read was significantly worse content than Hacker News comments.
  - jareklupinski 6y ago
    i'm just happy all of you are still commenting for free :)
- SilverRed 6y ago
  You don't have to put your content on google, you can add yourself to robots txt and google will respect that. You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND force them to pay for being forced to take it. A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid content with.
  - ori_b 6y ago
    You missed the point. The observation is that Google makes money from eyeballs on ads. The reason they make money is that they can lead people to the content that they want. The content that they want comes from websites, which benefit from the traffic google sends their way. If Google stops sending traffic their way, they won't block google in robots.txt: they'll simply shut down, because they're not making money off the eyeballs on their site. So, it's a symbiotic relationship: Google sends traffic to sites. Sites send their contents to Google. If Google tries too hard to keep eyeballs on their own ads, then they become a strangler vine on their own ecosystem, depriving it of the resources that it needs to grow. There needs to be a balance between the traffic that it sends to sites, and what it surfaces directly on the SERP.

californical 6y ago

I don’t know about Google, but I’ve gotten relevant Stack Overflow code snippets pretty regularly from DDG

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
But so few people use DDG. It probably isn’t much of an issue for stack overflow. If Google started doing that, my guess is that stack overflow would feel it.
- judge2020 6y ago
  So, do you think it's fine that DDG is doing it? Is the act itself bad, or only the outcome it has due to Google's marketshare?

tasogare 6y ago

I don’t particularly like the press, but as a profession they recognized quickly the danger of Google displaying directly their content on the results page. Too bad they fought only for themselves and not for the web in general, since they’re holding enough power to tip the scale.

shadowgovt 6y ago

> eventually there won't be any incentive to create the content Google is scraping It's an interesting hypothesis, but it assumes the only reason people bother to seek and aggregate facts is to get paid (and the only way to get paid is click-through to ads). No doubt that early surfacing of data could disrupt payment-for-visit-dependent models, but that doesn't guarantee the data evaporates from Google's view or that new payment models don't arise to replace the old.

freebuju 6y ago

I don't see any reason why Google can't pay for using your website's content on their search engine. Looks to me exactly like the same deal they've been cutting with media owners from Australia & France. The law should cut this side too. For individual content owners as well.

xiphias2 6y ago
Generally the price of information is race to the bottom, people shouldn't be expected to get payed anymore. I'm happy to pay for content: I pay for Youtube and Netflix, and they pay content creators. I'm also buying books on Kindle. But when I signed up for the Economist, what I read was significantly worse content than Hacker News comments.
- jareklupinski 6y ago
  i'm just happy all of you are still commenting for free :)
SilverRed 6y ago
You don't have to put your content on google, you can add yourself to robots txt and google will respect that. You want to be able to force google to take your content, AND force them to pay for being forced to take it. A better idea would be coming up with plans on how to break up googles market share to split it among multiple smaller search engines which may allow you to bargain for paid content with.
- ori_b 6y ago
  You missed the point. The observation is that Google makes money from eyeballs on ads. The reason they make money is that they can lead people to the content that they want. The content that they want comes from websites, which benefit from the traffic google sends their way. If Google stops sending traffic their way, they won't block google in robots.txt: they'll simply shut down, because they're not making money off the eyeballs on their site. So, it's a symbiotic relationship: Google sends traffic to sites. Sites send their contents to Google. If Google tries too hard to keep eyeballs on their own ads, then they become a strangler vine on their own ecosystem, depriving it of the resources that it needs to grow. There needs to be a balance between the traffic that it sends to sites, and what it surfaces directly on the SERP.