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]

#131

Post by techntoke » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #120

techntoke wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because those companies are ignored while everyone jumps aboard the Google hate train, and if anything is going to be done to fix it then those changes need to be applied equally to all companies at the same time. Otherwise it does more harm than good.

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

#132

Post by rozab » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:19 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…

Do you have any evidence at all for these extraordinary claims? Why would Urban Dictionary go to such lengths to suppress a competitor which posed no threat[0]?

I also notice that the homepage hasn't been updated at all for at least 8 years[1]. I suspect this may have had something to do with its decline.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-10%202...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107121814/http://onlineslan...

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

#133

Post by teddyh » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

hluska wrote: post #111

teddyh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe you should realize that merely commenting upon someone’s word choices, inferring inexperience, and providing some elucidation, is not the same as “piss all over”. I mean, nowhere did I say anything else negative about anything in mfer’s comment; I did not even disagree with anything they said!

Ergo, please take your lecturing about “basic human decency” somewhere else.

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

#134

Post by sjg007 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

I am not sure why copyright law doesn't apply? Also celebrity net worth should create a trademark net worth which is obviously an approximation of the true net worth. That's different than a sports fact.. But still I don't see why copyright law doesn't apply if Google is directly sourcing material.

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

#135

Post by mawise » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:28 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…

While this is all very shady, it also seems to be a poor long-term business decision for Google.

"Our revenue and profits have dropped accordingly,which has forced me to cut our staff down to a bare bones team ... the quality of our content and product have dropped"

If CNW is no longer able provide that data because of financial insolvency, then Google no longer has a source they can scrape. This smells like the poor short-term incentives that drive individual roles instead of simply unethical behavior on Google's part.

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

#136

Post by calcifer » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

dustingetz wrote: post #116

Surely they can find a stronger example than a spammy SEO business that didn't exist before google, couldn't exist without and doesn't exist after? Google sucks now but not finding this compelling

Why would the nature of the business be relevant to a House committee hearing? CNW is not on trial here.

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

#137

Post by havelhovel » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

People are saying this was a bad business model, but looking at the numbers it clearly wasn’t—-unless we’re also acknowledging that the bad part of the model was relying on Google to stay true to its stated policies.

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

#138

Post by jefftk » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

sidibe wrote: post #112

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…

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 celebriti…

Playing around with real celebrities:

* https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+david+net+worth -> featured snippet from Wikipedia, showing an estimate

* https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+net+worth -> database style response, showing answer with no link

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

#139

Post by flutterdude420 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:37 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…

> If the penalty weren't in place, we would get about double the visitors of that hate site. Given the rise of white nationalism in the West, does it make sense that a single person within Google can destroy a dictionary, while hate sites flourish?

Going to need evidence here. Your post comes off as a bit of a one-man pity party without it.

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

#140

Post by dwild » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #102

wombatmobile wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nobody forces you to (checks notes) create celebrity net worth databases. I just feel like we live in a time with more information than ever, the problem clearly being inaccurate information or propaganda. The problem isn’t insufficient marginal knowledge. Obviously we live in this high knowledge world because of, not despite, Google, so it’s hard to see if you’d really be on the right side of justice if you’re again…

> Nobody forces you to (checks notes) create celebrity net worth databases.

So? What does it have to do with having rights over it? You can say that with literally anything.

You go on afterward arguing about inaccurate information, which has nothing to do with the current subject, and still fail to see why it would be important to protect revenue source over information that was curated...