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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]

#251

Post by thih9 »

system2 wrote: post #32

I felt sad reading the whole thing. I searched "will smith net worth" and after wikipedia snippet, the first result was celebrity net worth. CNW depends on google, uses them to make money. Google is a search tool and wants to show whatever results makes users happy. CNW can simply remove itself from the platform and tell google never to use their data. It almost sounds like CNW is trying to bite the hand of only comp…

> the way wallpaper/graphics sites made changes after google image search updates.

I’m not familiar, this sounds interesting. Could you elaborate?

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

#252

Post by flokie »

hluska wrote: post #236
cik2e wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Just curious - how do you know it's lifted from Wikipedia vs. the other way around? It's quite hard to trace the sources.

E.g. did a quick search for Jerry Seinfeld, CNW is a lot more robust than Wikipedia (or the inc. magazine article it cites)

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

#253

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

A curated database like this can be copyrighted. The author even mentions this in the article, that the net worth numbers are not considered as commodity information like the height of a famous building.

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

#254

Post by arh68 »

hluska wrote: post #236
cik2e wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> I now know..

You prove it is an acceptable user experience. Of course it's easy to scroll past ads.

When I read Encyclopedia Brittanica, there are no sources. Yes, it's a pain in the butt to grab the book off of the shelf, but it'd still be wrong for Google to copy it.

If the data is no better than Wikipedia, why didn't Google copy Wikipedia? With all their PhDs and $100M bonuses, they could not do better. They copied CNW because the CNW dataset was better. The fakes prove it. To deny the CNW's data's worth is illogical, pitchforks or no pitchforks.

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

#255

Post by rjkennedy98 »

> Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse

A lot of talk here about the scrapping and capturing of the ad revenue, but I thought this was the most scary part. It’s one thing to capture ad revenue from SEO companies, it’s another thing to act like the mob and start taking retribution against anyone that speaks out against you.

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

#256

Post by arh68 »

WalterGR wrote: post #233
temp667 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No issues rendering in Firefox on Linux.

GET /random-word/ does indeed 302 exactly once.

22 requests, 344.58 KB / 12.62 KB transferred, Finish: 619 ms, DOMContentLoaded: 483 ms, load: 640 ms. Pretty okay.

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

#257

Post by whalabi »

strgcmc wrote: post #203
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #109

> 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…

I worked at Microsoft from 2010-2012, and the crux of the issue there was that, for Microsoft users who had the Bing toolbar installed, the toolbar would track what you were visiting in your browser and use that session/journey information to try and improve the relevancy of Bing results. If a lot of people who searched for "best pancake house" (regardless of what search engine you used) end up visiting ihop.com with…

That's the first I've heard of that side of the story, and I'm pretty appalled because everyone I know believes "Bing scraped Google" - which I think was how Google framed it.

I wonder how common misunderstandings like this can be prevented or treated.

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

#258

Post by arh68 »

manish_gill wrote: post #48

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.

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.

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

#259

Post by arh68 »

errantmind wrote: post #20

It looks more like an ethical argument than a legal one. I don't understand how this data would be protected under US law. Can someone explain if you think otherwise? Is the issue that the data was scraped? Or is the issue Google appropriated the scraped data for use in their search results? From my perspective it just looks like a bad business model: spend a lot of time and effort estimating net worth, and then publ…

It is not public nor commodity information.

> We generated content that could not be found anywhere else on the web and that had never existed previously in response to demand in the marketplace. The information we produce to this day is unique. It is not commodity information like the height of a famous building or the time of day.

To call it the open web makes it sound like the wild west, and it's not: are Google SERPs on the open web? Can I copy the search results for 1000 words and paste it on my website? No.

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

#260

Post by dave_aiello »

The impression I got from reading comments here is that CelebrityNetWorth.com isn't much more than a compilation of net worth figures in a database. I don't think this is a fair analysis of the holistic value of that website.

For instance, when I look at the analysis of Tim Cook, https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/t..., who's in the news this week partly because Bloomberg reported that his net worth has reached $1 billion, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-c..., I see the value of CNW's news articles. The CNW news article has a similar value to the analysis that's present in the Bloomberg article reporting on the same thing.

In terms of how much of the intrinsic value of CelebrityNetWorth's website Google should be allowed to report directly in its search results, I'd say it would be fair to report CelebrityNetWorth's estimate of a celebrity's net worth so long as Google clearly attributed the data to the site that is their basis, and provided a link to the original information.

But in my opinion, the real value of CelebrityNetWorth.com in 2020 is the curated biographical content about the celebrities and their analytical pieces presented in context with their net worth estimates.

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