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

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

#231

Post by temp667 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #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, a…

Dude - I went to your side. I looked up a random word - it had a 3 word definition with 12 seconds to interaction, at least a second of blocking content, a pageload time of 25 seconds (!! for three words!), 352 requests! 1.5MB page size, and content farm crap filling out the rest of the page.

I mean, I'm a user of the web, and I hated sites like this.

You score terribly among all major search providers I tried BTW. Your page-speed score was an F.

You have something like 50 redirect chains on a page with three words!!

Some of these chains are 20 items long (ie, 20 redirects). I mean - how does this even happen?

Quick heads up - This is going to rank terribly everywhere.

Yes, google does "penalize" content farms, and they did a big redo a while back to really try to push this type of 99% repeating content off their index. I've no doubt they hit some good sites, yours doesn't look like one at first glance, but even if I just go unlucky there were tons of sites (review sites / how to sites) that just had endless repeating content with very little originality.

How do folks at google even have time to deal with sites like this and these types of complaints "I confronted Matt" etc...

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

#232

Post by fortran77 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

tareqak wrote: post #56

teddyh wrote: 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…

> 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. A number might not be copyrightable, but what about a news article? What would happen if all the worl…

And these numbers aren't "facts". They're the result of research based on estimates from information about movie deals, real estate investments, business deals, combined with some methodology for producing an estimate based on that. This is particular creative expression of an idea, not just a compilation of facts.

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

#233

Post by WalterGR » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

temp667 wrote: post #231

WalterGR wrote: post #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, a…

Dude - I went to your side. I looked up a random word - it had a 3 word definition with 12 seconds to interaction, at least a second of blocking content, a pageload time of 25 seconds (!! for three words!), 352 requests! 1.5MB page size, and content farm crap filling out the rest of the page. I mean, I'm a user of the web, and I hated sites like this. You score terribly among all major search providers I tried BTW. Y…

I have no idea what you’re talking about. The site has never had any of that.

Did you go to the right site?

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/

What URLs are you seeing this on? What browser and OS?

I wonder if anyone else can repro what this new user is describing.

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

#234

Post by tareqak » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #97

Jefff8 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases have protection under EU law. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-dat... The EU is also interested in Google, and this looks like a slam-dunk case on the face of it.

Right on, Jeff8. And when Teddyh says "simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted" he's ignoring the fact that google isn't just copying dollar amounts. Google's copying a data set which establishes a dollar amount as a net worth of a particular person. That's a database. The only difficulty for CNW will be coming up with the money, time, and emotional energy to achieve a result in court over as many ye…

I would argue that even the appearance of taking someone else's work should be a damning blow to Google internally. Google prides itself of having some of the world's best academic researchers under their roof, and plagiarism in an academic context is usually a career-ending affair.

I finally understand what people meant when they would say "for some people, the Internet is Google". Google started off as a search engine, and many people were able to search for answers to their questions such that Google's search engine became the de facto platform for question-answering for this group of people. Over time, Google developed capabilities or acquired capabilities in answering questions in growing number of niches e.g. scraping websites for snippets like in this article or acquiring companies that had developed this sort of capabilities like ITA for flights [0]. As a result, the Google platform that is search started to vertically integrate these different niches bit by bit starving out incumbent competitors via prioritization of search results.

I can can think of one analogy that would be more obviously problematic and troubling: imagine a library system spread across a large geographic area with many branches that was wealthy enough to buy their own book publisher. Maybe it starts out with non-fiction and the quality of the published books remains high. What if the library system then started to prefer this associated publisher? At one point, the library network might end up saying that the other non-fiction books published in the same time period are not being lent out enough to be worth stocking, and so removes / puts them away in long-term storage. One day this library system buys a new publisher, but this time it is fiction, but maybe just one genre like adventure or children's books. Then, the same pattern of behavior emerges.

The library system / network I described above sounds like a very useful and successful platform: almost like a public utility.

Another example might be a telegraph / telephone company anytime before ~1950 buying national newspapers.

[0] https://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html

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

#235

Post by tyingq » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

remus wrote: post #106

tyingq wrote: post #104

Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.

It would depend on how the websites google are collecting data from operate. For example, somewhere like wikipedia isn't harmed through google's re-use of the facts they collate.

Wikipedia's traffic from Google is certainly down. https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/how-wikipedia-lost-3-bi...

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

#236

Post by hluska » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

cik2e wrote: post #126

hluska wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

You’ve totally glossed over the fact that there was an additional slide in the rankings after the site owner went public with this story. And what about the app being banned from the App Store? Why would someone go through the trouble of compiling extensive research for free? Ads pay for things that people want but are unwilling to actually spend dollars on. That’s the state of things, whether we like it or not. Don’…

I think that again, we need to put our pitchforks down and think through this critically. Maybe someone from Google did decide that CNW is about to blow the lid on their scam and decide to shit all over its business model. But let’s step back for an instant and think over some other possibilities.

Google released some pretty major core updates in 2018 and 2019. A lot of these updates seemed to focus on what the SEO community has taken to refer to as EAT (expertise, authority and trust). Google’s own guidance on some of these indicate a similar theme - they’re interested in sources, quality of analysis and other trust metrics. Some major sites saw some really massive drops over these years.

When I checked out CNW earlier on today, I read a couple of articles. There were no sources at all. The net worth calculation seems to be the individual’s reported earnings less state and federal taxes. And the content looks like it was lifted from Wikipedia - in some cases, entire sentences were reprinted word for word.

To get that, my browser had to make 426 requests, download 9mb of mostly adware and display ads almost everywhere.

Maybe this is all a big Google ploy but I think it’s more likely that their algorithm has changed to favour high quality sites as opposed to sites that used to get search performance because of valuable keywords in their domain.

As for their Android app, I’ve never owned a phone that runs Android so I can’t find and download an Android version but I decided to go down the rabbit hole and install CNW in my iPhone. They’ve apparently been ad free for two years, which is nicer than their web experience. But the content is the same kind of stuff as their website - entire sentences seem lifted directly from Wikipedia, their news section is similar, it’s just slightly repackaged stories from other sources.

Thanks to today, I now know that Takeshi 6ix9ine made $5m for a livestream which pushed his net worth to a reported $8 million. I’ve never felt so old or out of touch in my life...:)

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

#237

Post by hluska » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #209

hluska wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

That's not the issue OP is addressing. If Google is ranking them lower because it's a slow, crappy, ad-ridden site, that's understandable. It's stealing their data and presenting it as their own that's the problem here. A site being badly designed does not mean they're suddenly not protected by copyright.

As I mentioned to another commenter, I took a deep down into the CNW rabbit hole and even downloaded their app. I read a few articles and compared them to the individuals’ Wikipedia pages. The content appears to be a mild rewrite of their Wikipedia pages and in many cases, entire sentences are copied verbatim.

As for net worth, near as I can tell, for minor celebrities, they take their reported earnings, subtract relevant taxes and call that their net worth. For major celebrities, they seem to rely on Forbes and/or Business Insider as their sources.

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

#238

Post by hluska » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:54 PM UTC

ethanwillis wrote: post #201

hluska wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

Maybe if they served up some of Google's AMP™ pages they would get higher search rankings.

Actually, they use AMP. I read the 6ix9ine article on AMP and it was a much nicer mobile experience.

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

#239

Post by hluska » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #122

hluska wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

So they deserve to have their content hijacked (unattributed) by Google?

Here’s a fun rabbit hole for you to go down. Find CNW’s article on 6ix9ine and compare it to his Wikipedia page. Then take his reported earnings and subtract relevant taxes.

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

#240

Post by hluska » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #180

hluska wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

Any right or principle worth defending will always apply to you as well as to people you don't like.

I get your point but I went down a CNW rabbit hole and I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a whole lot of original reporting being done. There are no sources and in many cases (6ix9ine is a great example), the content seems to be a rewrite of his Wikipedia page. In other cases, entire sentences are reprinted verbatim from Wikipedia. The net worth calculation is basically reported earnings less relevant taxes. For major celebrities, they seem to rely on publications like Forbes and Business Insider coverage.