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The FTC report exposes the bullying of content providers, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Amazon, who were told that if they didn't want their content scraped th

The FTC report exposes the bullying of content providers, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Amazon, who were told that if they didn't want their content scraped they would be blocked from search results.[1] And Jason Calacanis is all upset because the report says that Google tweaked their algorithm to hurt competitors, which he claims killed his human-powered search engine, Mahalo [2] [1]http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-anti-trust-report http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-... [2]https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1

nostromo 12y ago
How can Google index content it can't scrape? It doesn't seem anticompetitive to me - it seems like common sense.
- flashman 12y ago
  To me it sounds like Google wanted to scrape the content and re-present it in search results (i.e. "Zappy's Pizza Place ★★★") meaning people didn't have to click through to the sites.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- throwawaykf05 12y ago
  If they just scraped and indexed content, it'd be fine. >According to the report, for one example, Google took content from companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon. In the latter case, Google lifted product rankings and placed them in their own search results for those products. When the companies complained to Google about the process, Google threatened to remove them entirely from results. That sounds pretty bad, if accurate.
- sparkzilla 12y ago
  Scraping page titles and snippets to create a list of websites is one thing, but scraping unique content from the pages that keeps people on Google instead of going to the source site is a problem. Say a bunch of restaurants are given star ratings by Yelp. If Google adds those ratings to its search listings then users don't need to go to Yelp. Google gets a double benefit: Yelp's content enhances the Google brand, and it stops them going to external sites. Yelp suffers a double loss: It loses unique content and loses traffic. Google's Knowledge Graph is where Google scrapes facts that other sites have compiled, most notably from Wikipedia, and presents it as its own data. This devalues all the sites that have compiled the facts, but greatly enhances Google. When Google acts as a content site in its own right it inevitably comes into competition with the sites it ranks on the search engine, hence the (inevitable) anti-competitive behavior seen in the report.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    I kind of agree about presenting Yelp ratings and only giving them the option of that or not being indexed, but you go too far in the other direction. Snippets in search have long been held to be fair use and, quite honestly, I see the Wikipedia thing as an SEO crank red flag: even beyond the fair use argument, Wikipedia is explicitly licensed to enable that sort of transformative use. Remix culture and all that.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Conduct that's legal from a copyright point of view can still create an antitrust problem.
      - magicalist 12y ago
        That's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)

nostromo 12y ago

How can Google index content it can't scrape? It doesn't seem anticompetitive to me - it seems like common sense.

flashman 12y ago
To me it sounds like Google wanted to scrape the content and re-present it in search results (i.e. "Zappy's Pizza Place ★★★") meaning people didn't have to click through to the sites.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
throwawaykf05 12y ago
If they just scraped and indexed content, it'd be fine. >According to the report, for one example, Google took content from companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon. In the latter case, Google lifted product rankings and placed them in their own search results for those products. When the companies complained to Google about the process, Google threatened to remove them entirely from results. That sounds pretty bad, if accurate.
sparkzilla 12y ago
Scraping page titles and snippets to create a list of websites is one thing, but scraping unique content from the pages that keeps people on Google instead of going to the source site is a problem. Say a bunch of restaurants are given star ratings by Yelp. If Google adds those ratings to its search listings then users don't need to go to Yelp. Google gets a double benefit: Yelp's content enhances the Google brand, and it stops them going to external sites. Yelp suffers a double loss: It loses unique content and loses traffic. Google's Knowledge Graph is where Google scrapes facts that other sites have compiled, most notably from Wikipedia, and presents it as its own data. This devalues all the sites that have compiled the facts, but greatly enhances Google. When Google acts as a content site in its own right it inevitably comes into competition with the sites it ranks on the search engine, hence the (inevitable) anti-competitive behavior seen in the report.
- magicalist 12y ago
  I kind of agree about presenting Yelp ratings and only giving them the option of that or not being indexed, but you go too far in the other direction. Snippets in search have long been held to be fair use and, quite honestly, I see the Wikipedia thing as an SEO crank red flag: even beyond the fair use argument, Wikipedia is explicitly licensed to enable that sort of transformative use. Remix culture and all that.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Conduct that's legal from a copyright point of view can still create an antitrust problem.
    - magicalist 12y ago
      That's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)