Spoofing Google Search Results | Hacker News Reader

Spoofing Google Search Results

wietzebeukema.nl

107 pointsm1guelpf18 comments

> unfortunately Knowledge Graph doesn’t tell you where it got the information from

This is really the biggest problem I have with the cards. They don't tell you anything at all about their source, and lead people to believe that Google itself has verified and checked the source of the information, making it very easy to treat them as "facts". A somewhat (possibly overly?) cynical viewpoint is that Google likes to keep it this way, since it makes it seem as if they're the arbiter of that information.

Not only that, the legal status of this info is murky at best and a clear case of copyright violation at worst.

I thought the Knowledge Graph was based on Freebase[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase

The text usually is from Wikipedia and the tabulated data seems to come from Wikidata.

Wikipedia's text content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, which means that if Google isn't giving attribution somewhere then they would be in violation of the license.

Google gives attribution when text content is used.

For simple bibliographical information like who someone’s spouses is, it is not copyrightable, and no attribution is needed.

Facts may not be copyrightable, but by academic standards they should still be sourced. Google doesn't derive shareholder value from training people to seek primary sources, though.

Not gonna lie: I wish google had been a bit slower fixing this. I was looking forward to having some (mostly) harmless fun!

it's still happening for me in case of https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Beatles&kgmid=/m/03j24kf, so it seems it may have not been fixed yet? https://imgur.com/a/8UypW5k

And attaching &kponly to the url also hides the search results for me: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Beatles&kgmid=/m/03j24kf...

Maybe the change hasn't been rolled out completely yet? I'm in Germany.

I am in India. Yeah &kponly seems to be working as well hiding the search results completely.

Known issue since 2016 https://plus.google.com/+AaronBradley/posts/92wjiusi2YC

Looks like he managed to put enough indirect pressure on the big G to get this fixed.

The example links do not work for me, meaning they show sane results. Is this issue fixed? Or is uBlock interfering? Or is my "Google location" (Europe/Germany) changing the results?

>Update - Two days after the publication of this blog post, Google seems to have fixed the issue, after TechCrunch asked the firm whether it was planning on taking any action. Although no official announcement was made, it looks like the kgmid parameter has been disabled. As a result, the flaw described below is no longer working.

Very top of the article.

Interestingly only one of these parameters has been fixed. You can still use ‘kponly’ to force empty results.

Seems like google figured it out

https://www.wietzebeukema.nl/assets/2019-01-07-knowledge-gra...

Define "fake results".

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