Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#51

Post by UweSchmidt »

smoyer wrote: post #15

There are lots of places where Google decides to "help" me, but sometimes I just want search results. Other times, I actually like getting the curated content (e.g. search for "delta 3810"). Is there a way to disable this? EDIT: I should also note that I'm one of those who switched over to DuckDuckGo for privacy reasons, so I don't see these results as often now.

Try www.startpage.com.

An option to disable the personalization of search and going back to seeing the top 10 results for a search term that everyone sees would go against the core strategy that Google and others pursue these days.

The idea is to gain information about you and give you personalized advertisement and services. This has been criticized with the term Filter Bubble [1]. Consider your phrasing "I just want search results", similarly the terms "have you googled it" or "let me google that for you".

Quaint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#53

Post by level09 »

Google is taking Cognitive Dissonance to a new level: It's okay for them to scrape every single site, download its content and images, and cache it on their servers, and run their AD platform on top of it. but that's not enough, they would still like to impose their rules and punish people who do the same thing.

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#54

Post by leephillips »

dangrossman wrote: post #50
jbinto wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the terms of the license allow for this kind of abuse? Just because something is CC doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.

Yes, they do; it's not abuse when you're given explicit permission. CC BY-SA means you can do whatever you want with it as long as you attribute the source as specified.

"as long as you attribute the source"

danielbarla said that they presented the material under a false name; this goes beyond copying and becomes plagiarism, which I can't imagine is an intended result of the CC license.

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#55

Post by jerf »

fear91 wrote: post #28

Google seems less and less connected to reality the bigger they grow. It's a shame that the search engine market share isn't split evenly by several different engines. I think it would be beneficent both to the users and website owners. Right now everyone tries to court Google and they seem to do whatever the fuck they want.

It's also worth remembering they're under continuous, distributed assault by human-intelligent agents (at least to a first approximation) trying to game them specifically. The miracle is that Google works at all.

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#56

Post by mkr-hn »

_wmd wrote: post #5

Cue damage control explaining the indiscernibly subtle difference between what Google does and what these evil, spammy scraper sites are doing

The difference isn't subtle.

There's this site called "News360" that sends a lot of traffic to my site every time I post something. It copies the post in full. Apparently it's a popular app for iPhone and Google Play. This is an aggregator.

Google copies my site so it can send people to my writing. This is a search engine.

Then there's the legion of sites that copy my stuff and send no traffic even though they link back. Most of these are scrapers, meaning they're adswill garbage dumps that get no traffic after recent algorithm updates by Google, but some are attempts to build new aggregators like Huffington Post or that News360 thing.

The scrapers are a nuisance, but don't harm me in any way. Google is free, relevant traffic. Aggregators find an audience and provide useful content to them with credit, probably using the RSS feed I publish for that purpose.

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#58

Post by pinakothek »

solve wrote: post #46
troels wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - Which site is that?

You won't find it on Google :) We're making a products recommendation site, focusing on goal-oriented decisions. We'll make the full announcement within the next couple of weeks. This reminds me. Google is really killing the "release early and release often" approach, if people will now have to do a ton of SEO learning and tweaking to avoid having your MVP permanently banned at launch day.

"Google is really killing the "release early and release often" approach, if people will now have to do a ton of SEO learning and tweaking to avoid having your MVP permanently banned at launch day."

Judging by the downvotes this is not a legitimate concern? Why?

Re: Matt Cutts is looking for scraper sites

#59

Post by leephillips »

spindritf wrote: post #39

It's a funny quip but it's getting more attention than the important piece of news it highlights. Google is finally doing something about scraping sites doing better in search results than original creators. Good. Many people don't write for money, to put ads on their website, or as part of some "content marketing" campaign. All they want is a little recognition. A boost in positioning on the SERP means we will be ge…

"Google is finally doing something about scraping"

I hope this is genuine and not a disingenuous diversion on Google's part. The fact that the Huffington Post still ranks very high for trendy searches makes me wonder.

As usual, follow the money: the scraping sites exist to make money, often through Google's advertising; Google gets a cut. The original content is often on sites with no advertising or real traffic, from which Google profits nothing.

EDIT: To expand on this: Google-search for any hot topic in the news, say the name of some misbehaving pop star. See the HuffPo result near the top of the page. Look down to see several results from real newspapers. This is where the original content can be found. Most of these newspapers are about to die because they're not making any money. HuffPo investors are filthy rich because they're gaming the search engines to profit from copy-and-paste.

ANOTHER EDIT: I apologize for my characterization of the Huffington Post. I was describing, accurately, the nature of that site as it was the last time I visited it some time before its purchase by AOL three years ago. The HuffPo I see today is utterly transformed. They use wire services, do plenty of their own reporting, and many of the links on the front page go directly to other news sites. They are no longer a copy-and-paste site.

Post reply on HN