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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

For all the tiny violins that could be played about how life is getting harder for SEO practitioners, this marks a fundamental and very unwelcome change in the Web.

Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well and we’ll take your content, keeping the traffic for ourselves’.

The long term effects of this are that Google becomes one of the bloated portal sites that it disrupted in the late 90s - and sucks the life out of everything else.

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This was kind of obvious when they started to force everyone to make their content discoverable by Google. They were just trying to move content from publishers to their own web site. And the best part is: they did this with publishers consent, so now the price to even appear on Google is to give them content so that they can keep viewers for longer time in their web site. It is a complete scam that is the culmination of monopoly behavior.

What kinds of searches are you thinking about?

I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

>Mike Moloney runs FilterGrade, a marketplace for custom filters photographers use to edit their work. He gets most of his traffic from articles on his website, such as lens reviews and camera-related top 10 lists. Recently, he noticed Google pulling photos and text straight off the site and showing it at the top of search results. There’s a link to Moloney’s company at the bottom of the section, but clicking on any of the photos brings the searcher to another Google page full of shopping ads for film stock. None of these ads are related to, or benefit, FilterGrade -- unless Moloney chooses to pay Google for placement.

Directly from the article and the type of sketchy shit google has been doing recently where it basically scrapes/steals content from websites and displays directly in the search engine.

The site FilterGrade appears to resell the work of outside authors, taking a cut off the top instead of directing traffic to the original authors' own sites, which do exist.

As usual, whenever you actually dig into these complaints it always turns out that the complainer is a galactic-scale leach doing something way sleazier than what they accuse search engines of doing.

You're saying every marketplace that doesn't require exclusive content is a leech?

I'm saying that if an SEO guy who resells third-party software is complaining that Google is cutting them out of the deal, the SEO guy is a hypocrite.

I don't understand why you think he's an SEO guy? Is he scraping content to build his marketplace without seller consent? Would Etsy be an SEO guy in your mind?

Yes he is an SEO guy, no that doesn't mean you don't have consent for content you are listing. Yes, Etsy is built on the back of SEO, as well as Pinterest and many others.

They're running a marketplace to sell stuff...

Yes a store front charged a premium to host something on their platform. Like you can levy that complaint against practically every e-comerce website on the internet from e-bay, etsy, amazon, steam, overstock, etc.

And they do link to the creators websites. You can click through to their vendor page which can have a link to their personal website. https://filtergrade.com/vendor/carlos-viloria/

An example of where Google's immediate answer just isn't good:

"how long does it take to get coronavirus test results"

Searching that, Google shows me a giant box with a red warning banner that says "COVID-19 alert". The box looks very authoritative, and in the box Google repeats back my question, and then provides an answer: 24 hours.

In the fine print, there's a link to a WebMD article (but when I click through, no where on WebMD does it say 24 hours).

The problem is that the actual turnaround time in my area (upstate new york) is 7-10 days to get results - according to a doctor who my Aunt got a test from yesterday.

This is far from an isolated case of showing bad information to an important question with too much authority.

I tried the same thing and the answer was:

> It may take a lab about 24 hours to run your test. But you might not get your results for several days.

That seems pretty reasonable, and it in no way seems authoritative to me (it sounds like an estimate).

Yes, if you read it carefully, it says "several days". I think most people searching will see 24 hours, and then click away without analyzing so carefully.

Several days is still far off from 7-10 days.

The point is, I'd much rather see a link to my county's official Covid-19 testing information site, rather than an arbitrary outdated snippet pulled from a WebMD article. Google's "best guess" answer is often pretty bad.

>(but when I click through, no where on WebMD does it say 24 hours).

It doesn't show it until you click on "How Long Do Test Results Take?" or View All

In the article it mentions Wikipedia as an example.

Yes, Wikipedia’s content is available for Google to take and display on its own site. But by not pushing through the traffic Google risks starving it off long term.

I used to work for a very large forum and information site, and as more of our content got picked up by Google’s snippet boxes, the more no-click searches and the corresponding decline in traffic we saw.

Google’s push to increase revenue is slowly but surely killing the golden goose.

While I think those features are cool, and also appreciate DDG's very primitive version of them, how come it isn't considered some kind of copyright violation?

After all, use a 5 second clip of a song for fair use and YouTube may automatically remove your video(or just the audio) on behalf of Universal Music Group.

Maybe websites ought to send DMCA takedown notices to Google when they find their content being used as answers in the search result page?

Yes, publishers should start sending takedown notices to Google for their content. However, most people don't do this because the result is to be completely dropped from Google.

Facts are not copyrightable, even if you worked very hard to find the fact. Copyright generally applies to the complexity of the result, not the effort that went into getting the result.

But the expression of the fact is copyrightable and Google is taking verbatim excerpts from websites and posting them on their site.

So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers. You want to make copyright even more abusive and restrictive for what? Feeding scummy websites that exist to collect clicks for returning simple facts? We're not talking Wikipedia type content here.

There is a concept of fair use, which is both frustratingly and wisely vaguely defined.

The relevant part of the doctrine is: >The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Whether a website is scummy or not does not come into play. And frankly the stuff I'm seeing showing up in snippets in google search are very much wikipedia-type content (often exactly wikipedia-type content). And we're not talking snippets that provide context on the search result to enable determining whether this is the content that one is looking for, we're talking significant pieces of the content, often reformatted and presented in such a way that not clicking on the site is precisely the objective of the presentation.

The problem is that you need to fight for that fair use in the court with huge amounts of money.

When was the last time you've seen an individual or small company win a fair use case against YouTubes abusive algorithm? Because the created content gets taken down constantly even if its fair use. The algorithm doesn't care... and neither do giant copyright holding corporations that issue automated frivolous takedowns.

> So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

I think there's a difference between a company with billions in revenue doing it versus "you".

> Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers.

You say this as if Google.com itself isn't the ultimate tracked web property for an advertising giant.

> If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

Except that the (current American) law doesn't work that way - the 800 pound gorillas use their billions to pay lawyers to abuse small creators and outlets based on such creative interpretations of copyright laws. The gorillas are capable of fighting a copyright battle at court over details while they can just abuse the same right into some individuals bankrupcy.

Giving them even more power over your expression is incredibly harmful to society.

> do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

You can't see how me quoting a line from a movie and Google reproducing tracts of content verbatim might be of different type?

Do you really, REALLY want to make facts copyrightable and owned by corporations? Plain information? Weaponized, that would destroy Wikipedia, blogs and tutorials.

Let's not make copyright even more cancerous as it already is.

That's not what I'm saying at all. When you write about a fact, you have copyright to the way that you assembled words to communicate that fact. When Google is taking snippets from other website and presenting it as their own content in a way that discourages visiting the sites where Google got that content, while displaying their own ads and services, they are effectively plagiarizing and committing acts that are anticompetitive and possibly not fair use. If a site wants to prevent Google from using their content for free to keep people off of their site, they should have the right to do so.

I'm about as far from a copyright shill as you can get without being an information anarchist. I think the copyright system in the United States needs to be completely overhauled and should stop giving corporations indefinite monopolies over ideas. But this is a case where the existence of copyright could be a good thing for the little guy to resist abuse from Big Data.

I find search engines useful, there's a tradeoff though. Copyright is what it is and the information is either copyrighted and should be respected or the law needs to change. Try scraping Google and see how far you get as a business.

>The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

So, by your own numbers, websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google.

>What kinds of searches are you thinking about?

Sounds like pretty much all your searches can be used as examples then.

> websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google

No because less than 100% of my searches are for questions with simple answers.

Part of the reason getting an answer quickly from Google is so appealing is because the sources that Google uses seem to be hostile to their audience. I use Google Fi and pay $10 / GB for my data which means your ad heavy page may cost me more in bandwidth fees than you get from ads.

Do you think newsreaders are as evil as Google? I use NetNewsWire on my tablet and very few of the feeds I subscribe to show any ads and I rarely click through to the source.

>Do you think newsreaders are as evil as Google? I use NetNewsWire on my tablet and very few of the feeds I subscribe to show any ads and I rarely click through to the source.

I haven't used an RSS reader in a while, so I may be wrong on this but:

1) Last I remembered content creators could still place ads that are displayed through the reader, so it's not a complete loss if you don't click through.

2) NetNewsWire is not operating at nearly the same scale as Google, and isn't coming close to the anti-competitive, monopolistic effects that Google has.

There are clearly some benefits to users in the short term, but in the long term it just entrenches Google further and hurts competition, which is bad for users in the long term.

In the long term, basic facts will be table stakes for anything that wants to answer questions.

Think about Amazon's Echo, Apple's Siri, or the Google Assistant. You can ask any of them about weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get basic factual answers. I would expect digital assistants to be able to handle queries of much greater complexity in the future and I would expect google.com to keep up with that. If they make the user experience great, users will keep using Google and if that's where the users are, then that's where publishers will want to be as well.

The barrier to switching search engines is ridiculously low. If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users (and I would consider forcing users to click through to a weather site a bad idea) then they will switch to a better search engine.

There's almost no search engine competition, so whether it's easy to switch is irrelevant because for the average user, there's no option to switch to.

Echo/Siri/Google assistant actually make it harder for people to switch, because the average user is not going to install google assistant on an echo device, which means they have to spend money and learn a new device in order to use a new assistant. So if in your future you're treating assistants as search engines, lock-in becomes worse.

>If Google starts to make decisions that are bad for users

Google has already made plenty of decisions that are bad for users, and they still have 90% market share because there's no meaningful competition.

You're basically envisioning a dystopian future where facts are controlled by a small set of mega corporations.

Anything AMP related. Travel search (in the event they aren't hurting enough). Agree weather is an improvement.

You lose the serendipity of other things sites might tell you - you get Dr. Fauci's age quicker, and a few other bits that Google sanction as appropriate for you, but that's all you get. Google can censor the rest of the facts if they choose to, and you'll never know because you don't leave the safe walls of Google's search page. To date Google have 'only' censored search results in countries like China, but doesn't have to be the case. They could manipulate what they show people. At least on Wikipedia there's a visible history behind every edit.

The other side of that coin is that you also have to pay the cost of losing of the freedom to be discovered online if you have something to say. If you have a brilliant way of telling people the weather with 100% accuracy then you're not going to get anywhere with that because no one leaves Google to get the weather forecast any more.

>They could manipulate what they show people.

I think this already happens, as an example I was searching for something like "X in Garry Mod" and most things on the results were youtube results. I can't prove this is deliberate but it feels weird you search for some API and you get either a full page of Youtube results or Google answers.

I get that "censorship" is dominating some people's thinking these days, but the relevancy here is ... tenuous.

Google always controlled the search results, and therefore the information you were going to see. Filtering the pages they link to isn't materially different from filtering the facts they choose to feature.

There's also a complete lack of motive here: Google allows you to pay them to "manipulate" SERPS (by placing your ad on it). And they tend to follow local laws. Beyond that, there just aren't any credible examples of manipulation, nor are there any plausible theories as to what would motivate them to do so.

I believe people feel uneasy about these changes because it's unsustainable: when they cut off all traffic to <x>, <x> will soon stop producing the data Google is recycling.

Plus, we all see ourselves as potential heroes in a story about some scrappy startup or project doing cool things with barely any budget and being successful. That opportunity relies on search as one of very few zero-cost meritocratic channels to find users.

Google always controlled the search results, and therefore the information you were going to see.

The difference is that now they're incentivizing you not to click on the search results for informational searches. There could be damning evidence that IAmEveryone is mean to kittens on the first result, but if people don't click it they'll never know.

>Google always controlled the search results, and therefore the information you were going to see. Filtering the pages they link to isn't materially different from filtering the facts they choose to feature.

And they have been caught over and over either flat out memory holing or burying things they are ideologically opposed to as well.

Google is becoming an AI engine. You type in "How to clean a wound?" and it tells you how. You type in "How to price an option contract?", and it tells you. Forget about GPT-3, Google is the real deal. If they're able to continue executing on this vision, the sky's the limit.

These type of queries seem to have become the exception. Google is still useful if you're trying to find a product you want to buy. Maybe.

Occasionally I'll get lucky with a hyper-specific query that hasn't been SEO to shit, but otherwise Google search has become a glorified Yellow Pages.

Far from being AI, I've watched Google search get dumber with time.

Arguably, there is nothing wrong with the concept of showing snippets/answers instead of links. If you are looking for your car keys, you want to find the keys not a note that tells you were to look.

The problem is different and is similar to oil exploitation. Google is exploiting the website content for enormous benefit and with no compensation. If Google compensated the websites it takes content from (50%-50% profit split?) it would be a whole another tune.

Pointed this out to my elderly father last week. Showed him how much cleaner Duck.com is for search results. He said he’d give it a try.

There is still hope if switching lay people over to more consumer friendly products. Just like any transition it’ll take time and effort.

Hopefully more people continue to switch.

Likely the result of their plan to make the web voice-searchable.

>life is getting harder for SEO practitioners

waiting for the boomers on this site to realize how much youtube has turned into google search seo spam

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