
Tweet Showing How Google Itself Is a “Scaper Site” Goes Viral - maheshone
http://searchengineland.com/google-scraper-tweet-185684
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izzydata
I don't see how this can be considered "Massively Viral". Not even viral, it
isn't even interesting or note worthy.

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lolwutf
At the time of this reply, it is at ~14.7k retweets + ~9k favorites. That's
some fairly respectable distribution.

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mwfunk
In this case, scraping content makes perfect sense for a search engine that
wants to show previews or other useful content for search results. Not sure
what the big deal is, aside from providing somewhat nonsensical fuel for
people who really, really want to have a big finger-pointing "j'accuse!"
moment with respect to Google.

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kevingadd
I don't see how you can argue that Google's scraping adds value in cases like
this. They literally grabbed the content off Wikipedia and put it in a box...
right above the snippet from Wikipedia that appears in the #1 search result
(which is Wikipedia).

Arguably if the source you're ganking content from is in the top 3 results,
you might as well kill the scraped content box so that people can see more
search results above the fold, since the content you scraped will be there
anyway.

Of course, the boxes are good for Google, because they let them exert more
control over visitors and traffic. Google puts enough of the source into the
search results that the average visitor might never click through to
Wikipedia.

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piyush_soni
It actually adds a lot of value, at least for me. If you notice it doesn't
show up these cards for all searches, but only for direct questions which it
understands and can answer with fair enough reliability. It relieves people
from the hassle of going to webpages to find the answer to their question.
Most of the times, that's the only thing they are looking for. Your concern
about eating away traffic from Wikipedia is correct, but the big question is
what matters more to people in general - going on to a website just for the
sake of it, or quickly getting their answers? When I ask my phone, "How old is
Barack Obama?", it fetches the same from wikipedia, produces a 'Card', and
reads the answer out to me. That is enormous value.

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kevingadd
That's not the sort of thing being discussed here, though. The example in the
linked article is a search query that is _literally the title_ of a Wikipedia
page that is #1 in the results. You can find other examples for other queries.
In these cases, Google adds _zero value_ with the box but it is there anyway,
depriving Wikipedia of traffic and user interaction.

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mcintyre1994
Clever, but ultimately laughable. "A scraper site is a spam website...", that
doesn't quite work for Google.

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qnaal
A funny tweet; A grasping article.

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bobwise
Ugh why do we need an entire blog post about a tweet

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declan
Because journalists have an incentive to attract readers, and it worked. The
blog post made it to the front page of HN.

(I don't think I've ever written a news article about a tweet and likely would
not, barring extreme examples such as @WhiteHouse tweeting that the president
had resigned or somesuch.)

