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Comment by manish_gill | Hacker News Reader

I have Zero respect for the Google engineers and PMs who worked on this project, scraping content without attributing to the original source, and subsequent change in the search ranking of the original source.

A very bad taste in the mouth indeed.

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I am not trying to defend Google or its practices. But how is the activity of CNW researchers different from what is Google doing? Unless the author elaborates on their method, "Educated guess" sounds like scrapping content without sourcing the author in the first place.

AFAIK there's no other database that they scrapped from. Reading sources like news articles, documents etc. is very different from copying the database that someone else created.

It's like the difference of tapping Yelp's API and create a competing service and looking at Yelp, Google, Squirespace etc. to create a restorant recommendations website.

Humans can also scrap. If CNW employs researchers, they must be using sources. These sources are not referenced in their content. Either CNW is merely making up the net worth figures, or their researchers are pulling data from somewhere to provide information about 25,000+ celebrities. If the second is valid, they aren't that different from what Google is doing.

I answered your question about how CNW researchers are different. Using sources to create a knowledge base for something is very different than hooking up to a knowledge base that was already curated and displaying it as your own without compensating the people who curated it.

Yes, sure. It would be nice of them to disclose their own sources too but I fail to see how this is related to Google straight out copying their curated database and showing it to its own users.

Like, why are we discussing it? What is the agenda here? Are we trying to conclude that CNW owners are also not that nice? Are you claiming that CNW copied your own research and demand justice too? If you explain what is your point here, maybe we can have a productive discussion instead of repeating the same stuff.

Understable not to include the sources after that email exchange because if they source the articles on their site Google could just cite those articles. What isnt clear to me is where the fake ones were attributed to in the info box. For the real celebrities it seems like they're mostly from Wikipedia which cites articles (who maybe look it up from CNW?)

Indeed. When you're in the business of taking IP from small companies and calling it yours, canaries start to choke. It's like making a pink version of anything: you're done, you're out of ideas, you have ceased to innovate.

agreed 100%

We went through something very similar

where Google 'disappeared' an entire category of apps from the App Store because one of our competitor/friend companies in the same area as us was growing very fast

That guy started talking about adding thousands of new users a day. Within 2 weeks Google had removed ALL (every single one) apps in that category

Also this is a search vertical. So it's the very definition of anti trust

anyways, it's good that people are talking about this

Which category, if I may ask?

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