Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

An obvious question: does Pinterest buy a lot of Google's ad services?

Given that Google takes MusicBrainz's data and uses it to display infoboxes but doesn't usually list MB itself, I think the motivation for indexing Pinterest is indeed ad revenue.

If you generate money for them, they index you, even if the content is bad, and vice versa.

This question seems not so obvious to me. Or at least, the incentives are reversed from what I assume you're suggesting.

If Pinterest is a buyer of Google's ad services, Google has a strong interest in ensuring that Pinterest doesn't get free organic results. More organic results, less need for ad spend.

Post author here.

Answer: Yes

Another obvious question: does Google pay for the valuable free content they get from Wikipedia?

"The licenses Wikipedia uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under an appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

Besides, Wikipedia isn't an ad-supported site, so Google's practice of including their text in the search result doesn't cost them ad revenue. You could argue that it means people will see the banner requesting donations less often, but that's compensated for by Google's own donations to them. So while I have definite concerns about some of Google's other practices, that one is no big deal.

No, not directly, though they have donated to the relevant foundation, but in any case that isn't quite the same thing.

The use of Wikipedia's information in search results is generally useful to the user.

Pinterest's spamming of search results can harm the user experience, making it harder to find content that is hosted elsewhere. Often the content elsewhere is better than that found on Pinterest because it is more likely to be the original source (or at least cite the original).

Does wikipedia pay its users who contribute the content?

Not an answer but a data point: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...

Any chance of a summary for those who refuse to play TC/Yahoo's privacy game (which last time I did look in more depth made it pretty much impossible to completely opt out of tracking) beyond seeing the interstitial and hitting back?

Does an incognito browser window help?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701160058/https://techcrunc...

I find the Resurrect Pages firefox extension very useful for a lot of paywalls.

Wikipedia is expressly marking its content as free, and is interested in disseminating it.

I'm not sure that Pinterest's mission is the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com