The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL).<p>What looks <i>far more</i> inculpatory to me is this, on the last page:<p>[…] <i>Because it controls essentially the entire
internet, Google has endless levers at its disposal to significantly harm or snuff out a rival.</i><p><i>I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our organic rankings have continued to suffer since I’ve
become a vocal critic of their practices. Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of
a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW
mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse. As a
result we were also banned from using the Google’s dominant Ad Mob mobile ad platform.</i><p>This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.
Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary (<a href="http://onlineslangdictionary.com" rel="nofollow">http://onlineslangdictionary.com</a>) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it.<p>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, and they knew each other. But that’s incredibly circumstantial. 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.<p>I’ve written in length about the manual penalty here: <a href="http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/" rel="nofollow">http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/</a><p>Edit 0825 Pacific: I have to work. I’ll respond to comments later. You can also reach out directly - contact info is in my profile.
> 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.<p>I remember a few years ago Google had a big blog post about how they’d injected some fake search results to catch Bing scraping like this. It certainly seemed like they thought it was a bad thing back then.
And yet I constantly get CAPTCHA's just from blocking tracking cookies.<p>The biggest scraper of them all goes to incredible lengths to prevent scraping. How ironic.<p>I hope the US govt demolishes these monopolies. It's not just in web either, the closest historical precedent I can think of is the Robber Barons of the 30's
I searched for a couple of celebrities, and in one case celebritynetworth.com is the top result, in the other it is the third result.<p>Both queries show info boxes with the estimated net worth, both cite other pages (no link to celebritynetworth.com), and one showed another number than celebritynetworth.com.<p>celebritynetworth.com has a robots.txt. This file has no restriction on Google or any other bot.<p>Each celebrity page seems to have the following meta tag:<p><pre><code> <meta name=googlebot content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">
</code></pre>
Given the above, it seems like Google is correctly listing celebritynetworth.com high in it's rankings, and using other resources for the info box, which is what celebritynetworth.com is asking them to do.<p>While it's hard to speculate about what happened in the past, it looks like Google is doing the correct thing now, and that this information isn't actually so novel in general.
"The Featured Snippet also incorporated images of the celebrity scraped from the web to create a widget that took up 40% of a desktop result page and 80% of a mobile result page. This is still how Google displays most net worth results today"<p>FWIW I tried "larry david net worth" and "craig david net worth" on Google from the UK and didn't get this result - Larry David was a snippet from Wikipedia, clearly attributed, and Craig David was from CNW, again clearly attributed - basically an oversize search result with the relevant bit highlighted. Not sure if this is a recent change in response to this or not
Out of curiosity, I tried searching a number of "$X Net Worth Queries" to see how it looks today. Snoop Dogg, Mike Trout, Will Smith.<p>For each I got an infobox sourced from Wikipedia or a news article and Celebrity Net Worth was somewhere in the top 1-3 organic results.
I only see one solution: Make Google split the search business out so that it only provides search and nothing else. That was Google's stated 'point' of their own site and they should be held to it.<p>They are like a bad rash, just ripping off from businesses of all sizes and relying on their dominance in search and financial muscle to get away with it.<p>Siphoning off search into its own unit would defang Google's ability to use their search engine dominance to upend others business models and would also reduce the incentives to do such shady things as well.
I think this quote is the most interesting in the testimony:<p><i>In June 2019, search engine analyst Rand Fishkin put together a report about Google using data from web analytics firm Jumpshot. The data show that today an estimated 48.96% of all Google searches end with the searcher NOT clicking through to a website. The same report estimates that 7% of all search clicks go to a paid ad result and 12% go to properties owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Moreover, those stats do not even show the full extent of the problem because the data largely relied upon desktop devices and could not track searches that took users to a Google-owned app like the YouTube or Google Maps.</i>
I'm not sure if this is ethical and legal problem. But one thing for sure is Google has too much leverage both technically and financially.<p>Google has slowly increased the reliability on Google for consumers everywhere that they are essentially a monopoly which is bad for the market. It is about time a new player comes into picture with same user interface and different business model which can empower these internet entrepreneurs.
Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.
An odd witness for the very true issues people have with Google Search. Google is crediting all websites it uses information from. It might be sad for such a site but I wonder how the creator thought that this is sustainable. Sites with biographical data for famous people already existed and for them adding net worth information is easy. So if not Google had kill them, they might have being killed by IMDb oder Wikipedia.
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
Information without DRM can easily become a public good: it can be copied without limits and a loss in quality. Once it's out in the open, people will access it easier, but that also makes it near-impossible for the information-owner to make a living. At the beginning, Google was beneficial to both the information-seekers and the information-owners because it connected them (while showing ads in the search results). With the "featured snippet" it increased the user experience by a little (and multiply this with the user count), while depriving the original owner of information from its entire revenue. (Much like how Spotify made music cheaper for everyone, at the expense of artists.) The nice way to solve this would be if Google gave a cut to CelebrityNetWorth, as Spotify gives to artists. (While Google would bring CNW more requests this way, their price would also be depressed; Spotify doesn't pave the way to the riches. [1])<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-services-rates-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/04/12/streaming-music-...</a>
I have Zero respect for the Google engineers and PMs who worked on this project, scraping content without attributing to the original source, and subsequent change in the search ranking of the original source.<p>A very bad taste in the mouth indeed.
It looks more like an ethical argument than a legal one. I don't understand how this data would be protected under US law. Can someone explain if you think otherwise?<p>Is the issue that the data was scraped? Or is the issue Google appropriated the scraped data for use in their search results?<p>From my perspective it just looks like a bad business model: spend a lot of time and effort estimating net worth, and then publish it on the open web. Publicly available data can be freely and legally scraped (and I wouldn't want it any other way): <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...</a>
You would not expect of such big business to behave in a different way. What we consumers can do is to try to use alternative services where we can, e.g. I am happy with using Firefox instead of Chrome
Many commenters are interpreting this as strictly a matter of copyright violation, and are asking the question of whether facts can be copyrighted. But that's too narrow a way of looking at this; there's also antitrust law. If Google scrapes everything interesting off of other sites and presents it as their own, even if it finds a way to do this that does not violate copyright, it's anti-competitive behavior that may violate antitrust law.<p>(I'm not addressing the European database protection rules which may also apply).
> Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse<p>A lot of talk here about the scrapping and capturing of the ad revenue, but I thought this was the most scary part. It’s one thing to capture ad revenue from SEO companies, it’s another thing to act like the mob and start taking retribution against anyone that speaks out against you.
I think many would be surprised at the trivial and childish changes that Google does to hurt web sites.<p>Many don’t speak out for fear of further being punished by Google.
There's evidence of Google engaging in similar behavior with regard to song lyrics on Genius.com:
<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-stole-lyrics-morse-code-848781/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/genius-google-...</a><p>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.<p>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.
Wow! Holy smokes. What a terrible company.<p>Oddly enough, as their practices may destroy the internet perhaps they will eventually destroy their own livelihood.<p>Speaking for myself, I no longer search for product reviews and comparisons. Why waste my time when all the content is fake? Probably fake due to the Google search ranking tweaks. Now I go straight to the sellers.<p>What is sad in all this is all the great people that work for such shitty companies and what that implies regarding the state of our morality as computer scientists and engineers.
The impression I got from reading comments here is that CelebrityNetWorth.com isn't much more than a compilation of net worth figures in a database. I don't think this is a fair analysis of the holistic value of that website.<p>For instance, when I look at the analysis of Tim Cook, <a href="https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/tim-cook-net-wrth/" rel="nofollow">https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/t...</a>, who's in the news this week partly because Bloomberg reported that his net worth has reached $1 billion, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-cook-becomes-billionaire-via-the-less-traveled-ceo-route" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-10/apple-s-c...</a>, I see the value of CNW's news articles. The CNW news article has a similar value to the analysis that's present in the Bloomberg article reporting on the same thing.<p>In terms of how much of the intrinsic value of CelebrityNetWorth's website Google should be allowed to report directly in its search results, I'd say it would be fair to report CelebrityNetWorth's estimate of a celebrity's net worth so long as Google clearly attributed the data to the site that is their basis, and provided a link to the original information.<p>But in my opinion, the real value of CelebrityNetWorth.com in 2020 is the curated biographical content about the celebrities and their analytical pieces presented in context with their net worth estimates.
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.
> Are everyday consumers harmed by Google’s practices YES<p>How are consumers harmed by Google presenting extracted data in an infobox? Isn't it more convenient?
> When pressed, the Google team said it would be good exposure for our brand.<p>Offering to pay people in exposure is a really slimy attempt at exploitation, full stop.
I think Google is in the right here. Facts are not protected by copyright and they shouldn't be. Imagine being able to copyright the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. It would be a disaster.
The scariest thing for Google might be that generally people aren't cheering for them anymore, and many are following them closely to catch them as soon as possible.<p>Compare that to 10 years ago when I and others would cut them 9 yards of slack.
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.
Anti-trust q: how is celebrity net worth "your" business if ~100% of your users came from Google in the first place?<p>Seems to me, you're entitled to lock up the data behind a paywall, and Google is entitled to not send you its users. Google's users can switch search engines.m and some do, e.g. I use duckduckgo for incognito.<p>More to the point, how would regulating Google change any of this? Who would determine a fair price for every piece of information?<p>My sense: to the extent you don't care about the privacy impassioned of CNW, they're a legit value- added service. The exact economic value is somewhere between $0.01 per year and $100B. The free market can be cruel, but it's the best mechanism we have for price optimization.<p>Personally, I'd have pushed back on Google researchers and told them that we know our content is unique, and if they want accurate results, to consider entering into a legit partnership... for example, publish N year old data for free but require captcha/ToS (excluding search engines) for current data. Individual users may not care, but search engines will want the fresh stuff as a competitive matter.<p>Of course, this all assumes there isn't a second CNW competitor with good-enough data, offering it for less than CNW... and if less=free, then too bad CNW...<p>This to me is the weakest link in the CNW business: too easy to gather good enough data cheaply and there's not enough value beyond the basic number e.g. what's the breakdown of CelebrityXs NW, NW over time etc etc - very little market for this premium content.<p>Put another way, i could create a website called "what's the current time in Minsk?" but its economic value would be closer to $.01/yr because it's undifferentiated and there's no premium value, so search engines can and should just display the time.<p>Now let's take weather: in some places the weather is pretty easy (see LA Story, with Steve Martin)
and in others (cough nyc cough) the free feeds like NWS are crap and you never know whether to pack an umbrella. Accurate weather for NYC would be amazing value to millions of people and highly differentiated. The problem is that this data is super hard to get - even current data are often wrong! But if by some miracle you had this data, no way would i publish it - instead show that you've got the goods and license it. Google might play cheapskate but the weather apps would pay up and probably uber/lyft, the city of NY etc. Once you've got a few customers then approach Google: this data would be useful across the enterprise. You'd make a killing. But oh yeah, it's really freaking hard (unlike CNW).
I read the statement and think Google used and then and abused their service, but at the same time, publishing a database of people's net worth strikes me as being pretty unethical. Would they have been able to handle a GDPR request? Why didn't they put their own and their families info up there first?
I felt sad reading the whole thing. I searched "will smith net worth" and after wikipedia snippet, the first result was celebrity net worth.<p>CNW depends on google, uses them to make money. Google is a search tool and wants to show whatever results makes users happy. CNW can simply remove itself from the platform and tell google never to use their data. It almost sounds like CNW is trying to bite the hand of only company made them something. I feel bad for CNW but this is natural. I've seen many of my and my clients' sites go rock bottom because of google updates.<p>"Google Stole My Business" sounds harsh. More like "google doesn't do what I want them to do." CNW was nothing before google. Maybe CNW could make technical changes to their content the way wallpaper/graphics sites made changes after google image search updates.