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Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

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Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#111
post #85
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking someone else's copy written content and presenting it as your own can be seen as content theft. Imagine if a book author did that to a chapter of a book. When the one doing it can essential present the case that they should be allowed to do it or they will destroy your business then it's an abuse of power. When they are in a position to actually do it because they have so much of the power in the space it can…

> Taking someone else's copy written content […] (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.) Copying text someone else has written is indeed copyright infringement (commonly, but technically inaccurate…

> (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.)

You used someone’s grammar as a reason to piss all over a reasonable comment, merely because it didn’t 100% validate your own?

You should read up a bit on basic human decency and even confidence. Otherwise, you just look like a know it all who can’t handle learning new things. That’s weak.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#112

> And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build. I remember a few years ago Google had a big blog post about how they’d injected some fake search resu…

Recently one of the lyrics sites had a similar complaint that might be the same thing happening in this case (and maybe it was the same issue for Bing's case too).

If you specify that you don't want Google to take snippets, but a third party ignores the robots.txt or meta tags and has a permissive one of its own Google can just scrape it from there.

A missing detail here is what did the textbox for the fake celebrities' net worth on Google link to?

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#113
Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it.

It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, and they knew each other. But that’s incredibly circumstantial. I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive.

I’ve written in length about the manual penalty here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/

Edit 0825 Pacific: I have to work. I’ll respond to comments later. You can also reach out directly - contact info is in my profile.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#114
Information without DRM can easily become a public good: it can be copied without limits and a loss in quality. Once it's out in the open, people will access it easier, but that also makes it near-impossible for the information-owner to make a living. At the beginning, Google was beneficial to both the information-seekers and the information-owners because it connected them (while showing ads in the search results). With the "featured snippet" it increased the user experience by a little (and multiply this with the user count), while depriving the original owner of information from its entire revenue. (Much like how Spotify made music cheaper for everyone, at the expense of artists.) The nice way to solve this would be if Google gave a cut to CelebrityNetWorth, as Spotify gives to artists. (While Google would bring CNW more requests this way, their price would also be depressed; Spotify doesn't pave the way to the riches. [1])

[1]: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-...

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#115
post #60
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Hadn't heard about this before. Curious about how it is used by the public. And can businesses login and check too?

Arbitrary businesses cannot access it no. However the press can gain special access for a small fee. This means that when the lists are published there are always a lot of news articles about how much various public people earn. There are limitations on how they can use it though, and they cannot publish the whole lists.

Interesting. Thanks for posting about it.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#117

I'm not sure if this is ethical and legal problem. But one thing for sure is Google has too much leverage both technically and financially. Google has slowly increased the reliability on Google for consumers everywhere that they are essentially a monopoly which is bad for the market. It is about time a new player comes into picture with same user interface and different business model which can empower these internet…

The same could be said for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. At least Google open sources their operating system, browser and are mostly responsible for Kubernetes. If people are going to have such high expectations of one company why do they not equally apply the judgement.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They deprecated that years ago.

Gotta say, I preferred Google v1.0. The subsequent patches suck.

Android, Chromium and Kubernetes have come a long way. Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#119
post #41

The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its dispo…

> This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.

No, it’s really not. I just visited celebritynetworth.com. One article took 462 http requests, loaded 9mb of content and though DOM content loaded in 434ms, it took 1 minute to finish loading everything.

The sheer amount of adware on this site is staggering.

Let’s put down the pitchforks and put on our critical thinking caps. Does serving all that adware provide anything close to an acceptable user experience?? And if not, doesn’t it look more like this website merely fell out of search engine fashion as things like performance and UX began to trump other factors?

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#120

I'm not sure if this is ethical and legal problem. But one thing for sure is Google has too much leverage both technically and financially. Google has slowly increased the reliability on Google for consumers everywhere that they are essentially a monopoly which is bad for the market. It is about time a new player comes into picture with same user interface and different business model which can empower these internet…

The same could be said for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. At least Google open sources their operating system, browser and are mostly responsible for Kubernetes. If people are going to have such high expectations of one company why do they not equally apply the judgement.

There is also similar problems with all those companies too, not sure why you think that is some kind of defence of Google.
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