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Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

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Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#61

Post by artificial »

izacus wrote: post #57
ravenstine wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think those features are cool, and also appreciate DDG's very primitive version of them, how come it isn't considered some kind of copyright violation? After all, use a 5 second clip of a song for fair use and YouTube may automatically remove your video(or just the audio) on behalf of Universal Music Group. Maybe websites ought to send DMCA takedown notices to Google when they find their content being used as…

Do you really, REALLY want to make facts copyrightable and owned by corporations? Plain information? Weaponized, that would destroy Wikipedia, blogs and tutorials. Let's not make copyright even more cancerous as it already is.

I find search engines useful, there's a tradeoff though. Copyright is what it is and the information is either copyrighted and should be respected or the law needs to change. Try scraping Google and see how far you get as a business.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#62

Post by dave5104 »

izacus wrote: post #58
dhosek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the expression of the fact is copyrightable and Google is taking verbatim excerpts from websites and posting them on their site.

So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere? Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers. You want to make copyright even more abusive and restrictive for what? Feeding scummy websites that exist to collect clicks for returning simple facts? We're n…

> So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

I think there's a difference between a company with billions in revenue doing it versus "you".

> Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers.

You say this as if Google.com itself isn't the ultimate tracked web property for an advertising giant.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#63

Post by nend »

criddell wrote: post #46
nend wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on. So, by your own numbers, websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google. >What kinds of searches are you thinking about? Sounds like pretty much all your searches can be used as examples then.

> websites that create the content have just lost 99% of your page views to Google No because less than 100% of my searches are for questions with simple answers. Part of the reason getting an answer quickly from Google is so appealing is because the sources that Google uses seem to be hostile to their audience. I use Google Fi and pay $10 / GB for my data which means your ad heavy page may cost me more in bandwidth…

>Do you think newsreaders are as evil as Google? I use NetNewsWire on my tablet and very few of the feeds I subscribe to show any ads and I rarely click through to the source.

I haven't used an RSS reader in a while, so I may be wrong on this but:

1) Last I remembered content creators could still place ads that are displayed through the reader, so it's not a complete loss if you don't click through.

2) NetNewsWire is not operating at nearly the same scale as Google, and isn't coming close to the anti-competitive, monopolistic effects that Google has.

There are clearly some benefits to users in the short term, but in the long term it just entrenches Google further and hurts competition, which is bad for users in the long term.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#64

Post by jeffbee »

impalallama wrote: post #31
criddell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of searches are you thinking about? I like that I can google for the weather or Dr. Fauci's age and get an answer directly. The results page always has links if I care to dig deeper but 99% of the time I'd rather get the answer and move on.

>Mike Moloney runs FilterGrade, a marketplace for custom filters photographers use to edit their work. He gets most of his traffic from articles on his website, such as lens reviews and camera-related top 10 lists. Recently, he noticed Google pulling photos and text straight off the site and showing it at the top of search results. There’s a link to Moloney’s company at the bottom of the section, but clicking on any…

The site FilterGrade appears to resell the work of outside authors, taking a cut off the top instead of directing traffic to the original authors' own sites, which do exist.

As usual, whenever you actually dig into these complaints it always turns out that the complainer is a galactic-scale leach doing something way sleazier than what they accuse search engines of doing.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#66

Post by onyva »

jaden wrote: post #36
pedro2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's their business model?

Looks like ads and affiliate links. https://www.runnaroo.com/privacy

I didn’t see that. That’s worrying. A y idea if they’re related to Brave, by any chance?

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#67

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

mattkevan wrote: post #7

For all the tiny violins that could be played about how life is getting harder for SEO practitioners, this marks a fundamental and very unwelcome change in the Web. Google have decided that it’s more profitable to keep people on its own site than redirecting them elsewhere, a big change in its contract. Before, it was ‘structure your site well and we’ll send you traffic’. Now it’s becoming, ‘structure your site well…

Google is becoming an AI engine. You type in "How to clean a wound?" and it tells you how. You type in "How to price an option contract?", and it tells you. Forget about GPT-3, Google is the real deal. If they're able to continue executing on this vision, the sky's the limit.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#68

Post by ravenstine »

izacus wrote: post #57
ravenstine wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think those features are cool, and also appreciate DDG's very primitive version of them, how come it isn't considered some kind of copyright violation? After all, use a 5 second clip of a song for fair use and YouTube may automatically remove your video(or just the audio) on behalf of Universal Music Group. Maybe websites ought to send DMCA takedown notices to Google when they find their content being used as…

Do you really, REALLY want to make facts copyrightable and owned by corporations? Plain information? Weaponized, that would destroy Wikipedia, blogs and tutorials. Let's not make copyright even more cancerous as it already is.

That's not what I'm saying at all. When you write about a fact, you have copyright to the way that you assembled words to communicate that fact. When Google is taking snippets from other website and presenting it as their own content in a way that discourages visiting the sites where Google got that content, while displaying their own ads and services, they are effectively plagiarizing and committing acts that are anticompetitive and possibly not fair use. If a site wants to prevent Google from using their content for free to keep people off of their site, they should have the right to do so.

I'm about as far from a copyright shill as you can get without being an information anarchist. I think the copyright system in the United States needs to be completely overhauled and should stop giving corporations indefinite monopolies over ideas. But this is a case where the existence of copyright could be a good thing for the little guy to resist abuse from Big Data.

Re: Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic

#70

Post by propogandist »

sixhobbits wrote: post #3

As someone who has just launched a business to help companies produce useful free content for readers in return for their potential business, this is really worrying trend. That said, I have full faith in people. Specifically for people to drop Google and move to smaller search engines if Google no longer shows them the best content. And to use adblockers. Google gives me fairly good results most of the time with uBl…

>Specifically for people to drop Google and move to smaller search engines if Google no longer shows them the best content.

it's not that easy when Google has made an effort to push their browser aggressively, especially when they notice you on Google without a Chrome user agent. This has led them to have ~80% marketshare. Switching from the default search portal still doesn't free the user from being data-mined as users are generally logged into the browser. Separately, web visits hit Google DNS or SafeSearch APIs enabling them to continue build user-profiles.

All their free services are meant to drive stickyness. From Gmail to Youtube to Maps to Google Assistant, people like free things -- even if all their data is being mined -- and Google's single account ensures users are locked in and unable to escape from the bigG ecosystem.

Unless you go out of your way, I believe logging into a Google account on Chrome automatically logs you into the Browser too.

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