Google embeds Stack Overflow answers in search results

google.com

12 points·jannes··7 comments

Copyright laws apparently do not apply to google. They scrape the world but do not allow you to scrape them. The funny thing is that if a website would do what google does here they'd be penalized.

The google ideal is that the world provides content which it can then mete out at its discretion. For another nice example of google re-packaging content see google images.

SO contributions are Creative Commons licensed. See the footer of all their pages.

However, google is not necessarily giving the right attribution, according to SA's attribution pages. They're attributing back to stack overflow, but not the person who gave the answer, they're missing links to the users who contributed to the answer, and the fact that it's a stack overflow answer is, frankly, not obvious.

I'm sure Google's lawyers could argue the ambiguity well in court, but to my eyes, they're not doing the right thing here.

And, as we've seen with Field v. Google, they throw up the Fair use flag.

Here's a screenshot in case it doesn't show up for you for some reason: http://i.imgur.com/qzcnTkP.png

There's a few scenarios where I've seen this zero-click answers - for example https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=salary+for+software+consul... is a recent example.

I'd be interesting in where else this sort of thing comes up - it's very Duck Duck Go.

They have had currency conversion for quite a few years already: https://www.google.com/search?q=1%E2%82%AC+in+%24

New York skyscrapers: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+skyscrapers

Best movies of 2013: https://www.google.com/search?q=best+movies+of+2013

You can also just search for 'weather' and it shows you your local weather. Or you can search for the weather in a specific city: https://www.google.com/search?q=weather+sevilla

Flight status: https://www.google.com/search?q=LH+327

Calculations: https://www.google.com/search?q=2*pi*10%5E2

And more: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/3284611?hl=en

Some of these results are based on what they call 'Knowledge Graph': http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge... which pulls in data from Freebase, Wikipedia and some other sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com