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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

Any company that relies on SEO content is basically going to disapear. Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes. Not only that, other lower ranked content can be verified to be "true" using neural network based NLP, meaning that the value of content has gone down.

Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.

Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets. This is theft!

My guess is that Yelp is next.

EDIT:

I have no affiliation to those businesses, just that as someone interested in websites and internet businesses, its clear that its much harder to build a consumer facing content based website now. The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

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> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

TripAdvisor, Quora, and Yelp are just as rent-seeking and profit-driven as Google.

If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it. If Quora fails and another company takes their place, it's no loss to me - I'm no less (and no more) willing to write for the new company for free. If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing. Perhaps something is structurally lost for the internet by allowing Google to be a monopoly, but there aren't any incentives for me to care.

If you want a thriving internet, fix that. Ideally, make it the case that when I write a good answer to a technical question on my blog, it's as likely to be seen as when I write a good answer to a technical question on StackOverflow - the idea of companies relying on SEO content is a structural failing in the first place. Then figure out how to motivate me to keep posting to my blog (which might be letting me, the actual author, monetize my blog somehow, but might just be me writing for the pleasure of writing and knowing other people are seeing it - or perhaps the quantified pleasure of seeing trustworthy upvotes in some way).

The paradox is, if these companies fold, Google has to get the data from somewhere.

> If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing.

There are distinct advantages to having a single cloud, with a single set of protocols/APIs/etc. The only issue I see is if Google starts filtering/blocking in a significant way, then the blocked communities will build their own infrastructure. But Google wouldn't want that data, since they are filtering it out in the first place, except perhaps to train their filters more accurately.

Make that corpus licensed with a Creative Commons license where commercial use requires compensation, but non commercial use is freely permitted.

How come they're not being sued over this?

Probably because nobody understands the ramifications of what Google is doing deeply enough to build a solid-enough case. Justice is slow, too slow for modern times and laws are inadequate.

If you sue them they’ll just remove you from the index. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for Google.

Ianal, but an additional issue, is from my (limited) understanding, copyright applies to presentation not facts or the idea of something. If you take some info and reword it so the original presentation is gone and only the factual idea is the same, i think you are in the clear.

Again, ianal and dont really know what im talking about

They were sued by Rap Genius for a similar practice and I believe Rap Genius won.

I can't find anything about a lawsuit but they were using shady seo methods and Google deindexed them. Rapgunius stopped what they were doing and apologized for the dishonest behavior.

Looks like rap Genius hasn't filed suit as of yet. But they published the findings of their sting operation to prove that Google was stealing lyrics from their site. I must have been conflating two separate stories.

What's the paradox there? Google has its own review system for restaurants / hotels / etc., so they can definitely survive TripAdvisor and Yelp disappearing. They'll just collect the data themselves.

For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.

The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.

People generally use their real name on sites like Quora, Yelp, Amazon, etc. and they seem to work fine. You can also choose to use a fake name pretty easily on these sites - or on Google.

Let's be honest. Your coworkers are not interested in your posts.

Of course they are. Especially if you happen to voice an unpopular political opinion that differs from the herd.

Just having a review site is missing the big picture. People want authenticity and trusted reviews. Google doesn't know if you really bought the Amazon item, booked the hotel through TripAdvisor, etc. Google can collect data, but is it any good if they do it themselves?

Do TripAdvisor or Yelp know if I really visited that restaurant or that hotel? Does Quora or StackOverflow know if I really worked on that project or studied that subject? Clearly, there's widespread public internet in reviews without the automated verification.

And if you want it, Google sees most credit card transactions. In 2017, they said, "Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States." https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... (Later reporting found a deal with MasterCard, at least.) So they could absolutely know if you bought the Amazon item or booked the hotel, if they wanted.

I wholeheartedly agree that there's a centralization concern about letting one company have so much power, but that doesn't change that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in another party being the review aggregator. If we can't figure out how to return control to the actual reviewers, Google is no worse of an aggregator.

Sure but atleast Quora did the hard work of building the website, getting the users, etc. They own that. I think we need to increase awareness and outcry about google stealing content from websites. They should be required to pay part of the revenue from page views to the content owners.

And google did the effort to build the NLP...

There is no moral high ground in this story.

Making a platform for people to create content and building an algorithm to scrap(steal) that content is a very different thing.

This a completely useless academic discussion.. some people build stuf, some stuff bring money and other dont.

I'm not sure Quora's problems are entirely on Google. The site has a shit reputation due to the whole "create an account if you want to look at anything." In fact, didn't Quora try really hard to game google results to funnel people to its site? I've no love for Google's steady erosion of the Web, but Quora strikes me as a company that is just sad it hasn't managed to get big enough to do what Google is doing.

HN feels like such a sanctuary: a high quality space not (yet?) perverted by the pressures of a purely profit motive.

It’d be interesting to study how does HN thrives; more deeply understand the incentives that sustain the HN ecosystem.

Thinking out loud,'I would gladly pay to be on hackernews ecosystem'.

And so would many organisations who would like to use it to influence hacker opinion.

It's quite profit-perverted: the overarching goal is to conflate in the mind of engineers the idea of "hackers" - a group that traditionally is interested in the inherent joy of hacking and is skeptical of business-types - with the goals of venture capitalists and the lives of founders. It's not very explicit, and obviously I nonetheless find value here, but if you've ever seen someone build a technically interesting project and thought "Hey, they should get some seed funding and work on this full-time," then the HN gambit has been successful.

> If you want a thriving internet, fix that.

If you want a thriving internet, get out of the way. Too many big companies and governments are trying to force us to see only certain things.

Stop that! Back to the early 90's.

Quora is compensating writers (at least those they deem the best) as Partners.

How do you know this? The only published program is paying for questions, and they had a trial of "knowledge prizes" years ago as a contest for the best answers but it was shut down. As a "top writer" for 2 years, I've heard nothing about any payments for writers.

> If I write a review on TripAdvisor or Yelp or answer a question on Quora, I, the author, certainly don't get compensated for it.

But you do get 'compensated' you get a good feeling from it.

Along those lines there are many things that people do in which they get 'compensated' not by money or that money isn't the primary motivator.

Jeff Bezos does not get up and go to work every day because he wants to amass more money 'be compensated for what he does'. Yes it's a by product but I would argue it's not what drives him. He does it for other reasons and has other motivations.

Another example - A woman who volunteers at a hospital and doesn't get paid a salary does it to keep busy and to feel good not for 'compensation'.

Not saying money isn't important. But nobody comments on HN and gets paid although some people have made money as a result of commenting but my guess is that is not what led them down that road or kept them at it. [1]

[1] I say this from personal experience having made (to this day) a boatload of money making comments in another place (really you have no idea). But 100% never did it for that reason at all.

I don't disagree with you - but then there's no harm in the Quoras or TripAdvisors of the world failing to make a profit, is there? Those of us who review for the joy of reviewing and of being useful will keep doing it even if other people can't figure out how to rent-seek, and there is no risk to a vibrant internet.

Have you considered that Quora is failing because it's user-hostile? I do not visit Quora links on Google because I know it's going to tease me with a snippet and force me to login.

yeah I also think their machine learning is terrible. Their recommendation engine was so bad that I unsubscribed, it was completely overfit.

It used be alright but their noise factor has increased a lot since half a decade ago.

Before that, Quora felt like a small community similar to HN. They had founders and executives answering questions. They were still spamming email afair but not as aggressively as today and it didn't have what is x + 3 = 10?

I deleted it after I reached a million answer views from a sudden growth. The users that moved in completely destroyed the whole thing.

That day, I learnt acquiring users via heavy marketing or SEO may not be a good decision for a community. They are better as spectators or consumers.

I think they panicked a bit and went with high growth strategies that ruined the integrity of the platform

That plus it seems >90% of answers are guerilla advertising

I'm pretty sure every time I've Googled something and got a Quora link and clicked it, it's just been an ad.

I just don't click Quora links anymore.

I've never understood the point of quora, it is a worse version of yahoo answers. And that is about the lowest bar.

And those two facts are related. Quora actively drives casual users away with the forced-login behavior. So the only people on Quora are the people with strong incentives to do so... that is, people who are being paid. Marketeers.

There was also a significant uptick in biased/loaded questions on Quora recently (think election influencing/agenda pushing ones)

OTOH a lot of legitimate questions were answered by specialists or people very familiar with the subjects

That's interesting. I only "follow" (or whatever they call it) a few people on Quora, and Quora sends me an email of what some of them have said over the last two or three days, and I pop over to see what the opinion is about. And, then, there's already some sort of conversation or fight underway - but usually pretty light.

Generally, I find Quora to be a pretty "ok" place to have a conversation. Better than most of Reddit, for sure. (Reddit does have some fantabulous subs to be sure, but not very many! :-) )

EDIT: HN is good for conversations in threads, although they can veer off track pretty wildly. Reddit can get pretty vitriolic. You could have a conversation, but the participants destroy it. Twitter? Fuggedaboutit. Are there sites I ought to look at where I can have a polite discussion with people that I may or may not agree with on various topics? [FWIW - Before 2008, Reddit itself was pretty close to this, except for maybe /r/politics]

Pretty impressive though sometimes. I wonder if those people used their heads into something actually productive

I honestly don’t remember the last time I saw a useful answer. It’s just always reads like a generic advice spam.

The thing about Quora is that I would never use it to get an answer to a question.

I only go there to read a few people's opinions on things. If you restrict yourself to those people then Quora seems ok. If a Quora link shows up in my search results -- I know it's going to be useless.

The only problem is Quora seems to aggressively promote clickbait scammers / self-promoting twits. I find myself actively logging on to Quora very rarely these days as it becomes harder and harder to repel useless content from my feed.

Add ?share=1 at the end of the URL.

I think it is just irrelevant to the web today. I don't think Quora has a future to be an independent business.

To me Quora is just a more entitled/self-righteous version of Reddit, and much less fun.

I think that sounds fine though. You could consider HN to be "like reddit" too, but there's still value in HN.

HN is not valuing itself at 2B dollars, that is the problem.

It is Quora itself that needs to justify against that valuation, not anyone else. Where that is fine or not, I think the news itself is self-explanatory.

It's interesting how the value the owners get from HN is more kudos and relevant discourse.

I'm finding it hard to think of other domains with succesful quasi-public institutions run by for-profits without monetization. Are there other examples?

I discovered this recently: https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

It works really well for blocking quora from google results.

Exactly ! I'm never quite sure where to see the "click-bait" answer and when does a new question or answer stop or starts. Quora has good content.. But its HARD to read it...

I skip Quora as well. It's automatic.

I have skipped quora links for so long that I don't remember why I started doing so. It's just a synonym for not worth clicking.

It would be nice if there was a way to block certain domains from Google (or any other search engine) results. There are also a lot of sites that seem like they scrape posts from StackOverflow that I would like to block too.

There’s extensions for that. One such is (as mentioned by @bubblethink): https://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

> Google search and their new NLP technology is just extracting the question and answers from content like that on Quora, significantly reducing their page hit volumes

This frustrates me, but I think Quora's UX and marketing decisions greatly exacerbated this effect. Quora shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun thanks to their sign up walls. At one point (and probably still true), you couldn't even click a link to a related question within Quora itself without being forced to sign up.

This acts as a resistance, causing people to essentially bounce from Quora back to Google after the first click, so they can get a related question or answer, which Google provides thousands of pages of for free.

Google was on one corner selling fresh-pressed lemonade, and Quora opened a lemonade stand for 10x the price on the exact same corner. Rumor has it, Google's lemonade tasted better anyway.

Which reminds me Facebook's wall worked perfectly for them. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind signing up yet another account among the hundreds of accounts I already have.

Just in case, add a question mark at the end of the Quora URL (that prompts you to login) and refresh.

Links from within Quora miss that and then you are prompted to login, but if you add the question mark you can access the target without logging in.

Thanks for the tip and I mean that genuinely but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience.

>but we shouldn’t need to do that to have a decent user experience.

Not only that, this (as well as many other simple "tricks" or "workarounds") creates (arbitrarily) two kinds of users, those that know the trick and those that don't (and likely create two different sets of user opinions).

I mean, to me (because I know the little trick) usage of Quora is relatively painless (though I still try my best to avoiding using it because of the mostly terribly bad content) whilst another user that doesn't know the trick and doesn't want to login may have the illusion that the content, once accessed, may have some value.

Also, this might constitute a fellony, basically you're "hacking" Quora, using technical tricks to circumvent security measures they put in place. And no, it doesn't matter that the trick is so trivial.

Sure, that is why it is - rectius was until now - a secret, that only a selected number of criminals knew.

Yea exactly ! If you make it hard for the user to do simple stuff... Read and answer... They won't come back or like you much.. i.e #DontMakeMeThink from the user :P

I think there is a symbiotic relationship here. Google still needs to feed enough traffic into their main training sets so it can keep training. If these training sets were to fully die (or become stale) then the Google NLP would be equally useless. So Google has an inherent desire to prop up Quora, if anything.

Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.

Right, i don't think google displays the entire quora answer set, i see the google snippets of a quora answer set as an ad the click the quora link and read all the quora answers. I certainly don't trust that Google has actually extracted the complete set of valuable info from a quora page. Just like Stackoverflow i want to read many answers and many opinions. I would bet the when google presents a quora snippet, the quora page has MORE traffic.

I wouldn't call it symbiotic, parasitic might be closer to the truth.

To be honest I'm happy to hear quora is struggling. It was always an annoying page to use.

I'll be happy to see Yelp go down too, I don't like the idea of extortion under the threat of bad reviews.

So far what I have seen is Google search giving snippets or Google AMP optimizing for mobile. Still the content is physically from some page verbatim. The AI/NLP comes in only in top 0.1% kind of queries like “what is the weather” or “what is my IP address”. Saying Google’s AI is learning everything is like blaming Chinese for stealing all tech. Yes, it happens at some cases, but not likely. I am surprised to see so much Google hatred here.

The newest research out of the Google AI labs is all centered around extractive summarazation. Led by a researcher from CMU named William Cohen. Their next big business is content extraction.

What the R&D dept aspires to maybe do in the future is hardly the same as what they do in the present.

The extracted content on their search page is just the beginning. They are spending huge efforts to get better at it. Specifically, extracting information from multiple pages at the same time. Eventually it will mostly be a query interface that surfaces information for fact based queries.

Exactly. I have been recently just using the drop down to read a summarize answer to questions I have googled. No need to go further...

Quora and Tripadvisor are totally different.

Tripadvisor has a great mobile app, and actually a mobile app makes sense, as I want to browse local results, filter and compare restaurants and activities easily.

As for quora, it's more like entertainment where I just want it to be part of my internet browsing experience, just like Reddit, where I don't want to load a mobile app just so see a result.

I haven't used Yelp in years. AFAIK it's a USA only thing. Most other countries I've visited there are far more reviews on Google than Yelp. No idea how I can trust either of them (the reviews, not the companies) Yelp, yes the writing is on the wall.

An no, google didn't steal anything from yelp. They just let users review places and post pictures.

Yes, Google entered into a settlement with the FTC in 2013 for, among other things, scraping sites like Yelp and presenting the info directly in search results. Google didn't have any of their own reviews at the time.

"In its 2013 settlement, the FTC ruled against Google on scraping. Rivals can now opt out of having their content lifted, without fear of being demoted in the search rankings."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/20/google-il...

Yelp isn’t USA only but it definitely tends to be a lot thinner outside the US then inside.

TripAdvisor also has somewhat reasonable coverage internationally.

In my experience, none of these sites are great but they’re probably better than walking into a random restaurant.

So can they block the google crawler? If they do not then they not really care about being crawled.

The problem is not the monopolistic and profit-driven practice. It is that consumers are not willing to pay for anything and do not mind for their data to be mined, hence the only way for B2C are ads.

Is there any data to back up this claim? Anecdotally I can't think of a single query that I used to click through to an answers site like quora or stack exchange that is now addressed my the knowledge box snippet.

>"Google NLP algorithms use quora and trip advisor like training data sets."

I understand that Google competes with Trip Advisor with their own travel offering but might you or someone else explain how they use NLP algorithms steal business from them? Also could you elaborate on how they might be using NLP on Quora to their advantage. Where or how do they compete with Quora exactly? Thanks.

> The content is simply extracted and stolen. How can we have a thriving internet when such monopolistic and profit driven practices stifle innovation and creation on the web?

Judging by the number of copycat sites surfacing in Google search results I don't think there is anything monopolistic in stealing the content.

Remember internet portals? Google is slowly transforming from search engine into one.

Its even bigger than that. You can book an appointment through the google.com search results if the company (lets say a barber shop) has connected their booking system with the Google My Business page. No need to visit the website at all. How long until a percentage is automatically taken for every booking?

>Google stole the business of quora and trip advisor. They did the hard work of getting the content.

Most of the companies I've worked for are largely oblivious to this and continue to invest heavily in making their pages appear attractive to Google - even when the end result is negligible at best. It seems to be a really good way of draining developer resources at the expense of innovation. But perhaps that was the intention all along.

Yelp reviews are one of the biggest differentiators for me. Google reviews are always all positive.

Not that I see them much anymore. I switched to DDG and will not be switching back.

They can (and do) put their content behind a login sometimes to prevent this. Either way Google only gets answers as long those answers exist somewhere so I doubt Quora and its alternatives are going away. The site should be rather cheap to run as well (although it's easy to mismanage millions these days).

no, I left my door open to share my indoor library with neighbors does not mean you can take them away, google is supposed to help me to locate those original content, it should stay as a search engine to keep fair play of original content providers.

I don’t know if blaming google is the only solution here - it’s really Quora’s fault for not building a good way to monetize into their platform.

Lots of startups do that and most of those don’t get far. Quora did and now they need to fix it. Just like code debt.

Is it actually theft, or do you actually mean it's something more mundane like copyright infringement or a TOS violation?

I don't know what the legal definition of theft is, but to me if you take something without permission (even if it is just a copy) it is theft. Of course, I'm nobody, so it doesn't matter what I think. However, if we all acted like humans instead of lawyers (which by definition are no longer human), I think most people would agree with the above definition.

It seems to me, conflating copyright infringement with theft is little better than conflating it with piracy. Both are hyperbolic.

To be honest, it's not even clear to me that what google did was copyright infringement. It seems distasteful, even dishonorable, but I'm not convinced it goes beyond that.

We will probably see a great rift occur, its really mind boggling. The internet is ... plastic. All these algorithms, and mass herding of the human flock ... and the centralization ... it goes against basic natural laws if you ask me!

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