
Introducing Structured Snippets, now a part of Google Web Search - peeyek
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/09/introducing-structured-snippets-now.html
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lifeisstillgood
I always assumed that the personal-agent style work (ie a bot that is there to
help you wade through the morass of information) would be a personal
computation - local to you, probably configured and augmented by you.

Yet Google is trying to do it for everyone - and honestly does not seem to be
doing a bad job.

So what is the advantages of the old idea of an almost-AI assisstant working
for me when BFG (Big Friendly Google) does it?

~~~
walterbell
> honestly does not seem to be doing a bad job.

Is there any difference between the goals of an individual (person, company)
vs. the average? Is information a competitive advantage? Today we provide
unpaid feedback to improve private algorithms, tomorrow ..?

Edit: downvoters, what is a rhetorical question?

~~~
ihsw
One is derived from algorithmic matching, the other is explicit opt-in by the
user.

> local to you, probably _configured and augmented by you_.

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walterbell
Even if you opt-in to a centralized black box algo, it's not easy to audit the
resulting advice.

There is a big difference between explicit goals and the reverse-engineering
of intent, e.g. from search history.

We need both explicit goals and auditable algos.

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saurabhnanda
At what point will all these snippets stop being "fair use" and start being
copyright violations? What happens if your website aggregates schedules of
some obscure (but interesting to a niche audience) event and makes money off
of advertising. And Google decides to show the snippet of the next 5 upcoming
events on the SERP itself, thus killing your traffic.

~~~
throwaway41597
It's a relevant question. Regardless of what one thinks about copyright law,
it is what it is and all players should abide it. IANAL, so I can't say :(

However, I think there is a need for a more granular robots.txt such as:

    
    
        User-agent: *
        Allow-crawl: /
        Limit-display: /events 10words
        Limit-display: /blog 30words
    

This way, websites can state how big of a search result they are comfortable
with and everyone abiding these limits is safer legally. Websites will have to
be a bit lenient in order to have prominent results and gain visibility, but
they will have to limit that so users click the search result.

Right now, Google has its algorithms decide how much copying is legal and if
you disagree you can either disallow Google Bot or sue them, so this would
provide a middle ground.

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walterbell
> algorithms to determine quality and relevance that we use to display up to
> four highly ranked facts from those data tables.

Are the selected facts related to the user's query or search history?

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stonogo
Looks _exactly_ like DuckDuckGo's topic summary boxes, only I bet google spins
way more CPUs to autogenerate them...

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nikon+d7100](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nikon+d7100)

~~~
magicalist
That looks more like google's oneboxes/knowledge graph box, which already had
that kind of data (unless you're referring to something else on that page,
correct me if I'm wrong).

This looks like it's per-page extracted data, if google has been able to
extract data from that page, so basically a structured-data result snippet.

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spullara
Google finally launched Yahoo's SearchMonkey.

[https://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/siteowner.html](https://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/siteowner.html)

~~~
matchu
It looks like the main difference is that SearchMonkey _reads_ structured
data, whereas Google _infers_ structured data: even if the relevant data isn't
marked on the page or in any particular format, Google will still find and
surface it.

~~~
srg0
It's not so difficult to "infer" structured data from sources like Wikipedia.
Dpreview is also an easy example. I don't see any proof the feature is
actually about automatic inference, and not about hard-coded rules how to find
structured data on some popular sites.

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hartator
Come on Google, when you are going to impress us again?

Things like this feel like the 90s and shouldn't even to be something worth
speaking or caring about.

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halcyondaze
Introducing "we are the world's largest scraped round 202 and no one seems to
notice or care."

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ghostdiver
Google should share their income from SERPs with webmasters.

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stickhandle
... and let the spamming begin

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geargrinder
Google once again takes information from your web page and puts it on their
search results page. How will this affect click-throughs? I can see how it
might help with traffic sent from SERPS as your site might seem more
authoritative.

~~~
camillomiller
I really hate the way they market this changes as improvements for the users.
This is meant to improve just one thing: the time you spend on a serp, where
Google's directly owned advertising slots are. Authorship was actually good
for the user, but it was not for their ads, because it actually improve CTR.
No surprise they decided to kill it. Plus, they're gathering information
people (or people made systems) spent time organizing and writing. Don't tell
me that you can just opt out of Google (as I see mentioned in one other
comment) because that's ridiculous. If you're not there you don't exist.
Unless you're selling shady products/services on the deep web, you need to be
indexed by Google. That's the biggest monopoly nobody's really enquiring
about, and I keep wondering why.

