361–370 of 531 posts
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It's a devil's bargain. If you opt-out of snippets, it simply means somebody else claims the top spot, and you are left with even less traffic (by a significant amount)
> If you opt-out of snippets, it simply means somebody else claims the top spot Citation? I thought snippets are just for display, not ranking.
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> I disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results. Who made this contract? I never signed one. If I came to your place of business and copied your content and provided it somewhere else, I would be infringing your copyright. Do I have to put up signs specifyin…
I believe citing small pieces from a large text is covered by fair use.
Although there are other criteria to consider, Google's snippets clearly violate that particular tenet.
See #4 https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
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I like all the things you listed :) More seriously, from a moral standpoint, I would argue that what's at most a short paragraph extract from a website falls under fair use. I don't believe any site is entitled to clicks from Google's search results page, certainly not for such short snippets, which I believe don't exhibit the level of creativity that deserves denying the right to copy to others. By contrast, the oth…
A dictionary is a collection of short snippets. I find it hard to believe that showing those snippets for whatever word you search falls under fair use. The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms. Or at least some combination of their terms and the user's terms, instead of just google's terms.
This depends on the country. In the EU, this may be the case. However, the US Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" copyright doctrine in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... For a creative expression to be copyrightable in the US, it must have some minimum threshold of originality.
The wording of dictionary definitions themselves may be copyrightable if sufficiently unique. But the question of fair use should be considered as well. If Google as a matter of policy always consulted a particular database for a particular class of searches, without permission from the copyright owner, perhaps one could argue that crosses the line of fair use. But for isolated results, it doesn't appear much different than the current practice of putting snippets of the page below the links in the search results. For more extensive databases, Google often has an explicit agreement with the database owner.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I don't know anything about the implementation of the answer box, and certainly don't know the law in multiple jurisdictions.
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Napster also made users happy. And bittorrent. And libgen. Why the double standard?
I like all the things you listed :) More seriously, from a moral standpoint, I would argue that what's at most a short paragraph extract from a website falls under fair use. I don't believe any site is entitled to clicks from Google's search results page, certainly not for such short snippets, which I believe don't exhibit the level of creativity that deserves denying the right to copy to others. By contrast, the oth…
You know what another one is? Whether the usage affects the originators ability to make money from their work.
A legal determination of Fair Use is subjective and can only be decided in court. But, citing only one of the four pillars as moral justification while blatantly ignoring the other (equally important) ones is a little rich.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
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A dictionary is a collection of short snippets. I find it hard to believe that showing those snippets for whatever word you search falls under fair use. The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms. Or at least some combination of their terms and the user's terms, instead of just google's terms.
> The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms. This depends on the country. In the EU, this may be the case. However, the US Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" copyright doctrine in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R... . For a creative expression to be copyrightable in the US, it must have some minimum threshold…
Moral and legal aren't the same thing.
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No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. It's for this reason that's I've stopped embedding micro data in the HTML I write. Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Every month or so I get an e-mail from a Google bot warning me that my site's micro data is incomplete. Tough. If Google wants to use m…
I just got one of those emails for the first time about my personal site that's basically my resume. Apparently my text is small on mobile (it's not...) and some other crap I don't get why google thinks it's acceptable to critique my site without prompting. It honestly just feels rude. They want me to do a whole bunch of micro-optimizations on a site that already works fine because it doesn't fit their standard of "h…
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
On the other hand, it's surprising that you would get a notification if you had crawling disabled. Did you set this robots.txt up recently?
[1] https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?id=97_WUiIxx-...
(Disclosure: I work at Google, commenting only for myself)
I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet." Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet. No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" G…
No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. It's for this reason that's I've stopped embedding micro data in the HTML I write. Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Every month or so I get an e-mail from a Google bot warning me that my site's micro data is incomplete. Tough. If Google wants to use m…
A search engine is inherently a content aggregator; the functions are inseperable.
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No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. It's for this reason that's I've stopped embedding micro data in the HTML I write. Micro data only serves Google. Not my clients. Not my sites. Just Google. Every month or so I get an e-mail from a Google bot warning me that my site's micro data is incomplete. Tough. If Google wants to use m…
> If Google wants to go back to being a search engine While I understand the problems with Google scraping content, as a user these snippets help me find what I'm searching for faster. If that's all you're optimizing for, Google is fantastic. There are certainly good arguments to be made for other models, but for search, stealing content helps. I'm not advocating stealing content, I'm just saying that it produces mor…
I think what folks are missing is that a lot of these "zero-click" searches happen as a result of Google scraping your website, and displaying the results as a "featured snippet." Yes, they link to you below the featured snippet. No, more people don't click, because they've taken the answer from your website and displayed it right in their search results. For example: If I'm searching for "best nail for cedar wood" G…
On top of all that, Google's snippets aren't curated and therefore, aren't always correct. They can be (and almost certainly are) gamed. Users that don't click through open themselves up to carrying on being misinformed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/they-turn-to-...