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

There's evidence of Google engaging in similar behavior with regard to song lyrics on Genius.com: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-...

I think the points about people voluntarily building their businesses on Google's platform, and being thus beholden to Google's whims are well-made. The law, as it exists, doesn't seem to prevent that kind of thing since they're all private businesses, and this behavior benefits the consumer (arguably) even if it does hurt other businesses. Antitrust law (in the US) seems ill-prepared for the 21st century.

I tend to get interested in the policy concerns. Is web search so important that it should be considered a public utility, and thus regulated by the government? I think there's a case to be made there.

Then I backed off the context quite a bit. (Note I prompt for Google in the middle) Doesn't surface the conflict noted in the PDF but makes an interesting observation about FaceBook.

Prompt

You are Bob Warner, founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com, and are having lunch with an old friend of yours named Phil. You're discussing what the last ten years has been like with the site and some of the major challenges you've faced. The conversation goes as follows:

Phil: Hey Bob, I've been thinking about how much things have changed over the years and how you've had to adapt to keep up with them. What would you say are some of the major challenges you've had keeping CelebrityNetWorth.com up and running and making money?

GPT-3 Response

Bob: Well, it's a combination of several factors. One is that we've always tried to stay on top of all the new sites popping up and trying to get our content out there first. We were also lucky enough to be in business long before most other sites were. So even though we started off small, we've managed to grow into one of the largest sites around. Another factor is that we've always kept our prices low because we didn't want to compete with free sites. Nowadays, many people can get their information for free but they still charge a lot of money for their services. So we offer a good deal for our users and we've found that they keep coming back to us.

We also realized that we had to start diversifying our income streams because advertising alone just isn't enough anymore. There's so much out there that it's actually really hard to keep people's attention, and a lot of people block ads nowadays.

Prompt

Phil: What do you think about Google?

GPT-3 Response

Bob: I've been getting a lot of questions about them. I don't think they're a threat to us because we offer way more information than they do. We're not in competition with them.

However, I'm getting a little worried about Facebook. I see them moving into our turf by creating their own "Celebrity Pages" and getting content from their users.

Just to save everyone the effort, the closest thing to evidence amid that blog post's many wild allegations is that the pandas update changes around citations hurt the site's google flow. This isn't surprising. That hit a lot of low quality websites that were essentially arbitraging google to aggregate content duplicated elsewhere on the web. I worked for a similar business with considerably more traffic. We didn't interpret it as some directed conspiracy against us. We knew from day 1 that's a risk of developing such a site, and why original content still matters a great deal. We adapted and moved on.

The remaining proof claimed is that a whistleblower told him Matt Cutts implemented a penalty manually. But while our poster is quite willing to share the allegation, they're not willing to share the communication.

There's no proof on offer here.

> 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

The preamble to this post hints of paranoia, but this is where we know for sure. There's no reason to believe Cutts would have any personal knowledge or involvement or motivation, except that he knew another person who might have had some weak interest in maybe doing something. Of course, the poster feels that, having drawn this chain of connections, that he must be right and Cutts must be lying.

The poster feels entitled now to personally attacking a specific well-known search engineer, one who has been active here in the past. This seems like a conduct violation on here or any reasonable discussion site.

Thank you for the links.

When I refer to Matt Cutts lying, I mostly mean his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

I have no idea what that business is with that company.

I did everything in his comment to address the claimed automated penalties: removed every single ad and every single citation from the site. No changes in ranking at all, after months. I forget how many. 6 months?

That’s because Matt Cutts was lying: there was a manual penalty in place at that time.