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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 g
by 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 agoI 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 agoConduct that's legal from a copyright point of view can still create an antitrust problem.
- magicalist 12y agoThat's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)