XPost: misc.legal, alt.internet, alt.internet.commerce
XPost: misc.news.internet.discuss, alt.internet.services, alt.in
ernet.search-engines
XPost: alt.comp.google, comp.internet.services.google, alt.business
From: anonymous@anonymous.com
How Google eats a business whole
Google’s Featured Snippets are not only often wrong, they’re also damaging
to small businesses that depend on search traffic.
CelebrityNetWorth.com launched in 2008 because Brian Warner, a former finance
major working at a digital media company, wondered what Larry David was worth.
“Honestly, I wanted to know how much money Larry David had,” Warner said.
“I think Curb Your Enthusiasm had just come back, and I was like, ‘God, he
must have made so much money from Seinfeld.’ I Googled something like
‘Larry David net worth
and the results were garbage.”
According to CelebrityNetWorth.com, Larry David is now worth $400 million.
Warner acknowledges that it’s an inexact science, but he and his employees
don’t simply conjure their numbers. They look at real estate transactions,
news reports of large
purchases and salaries, and sometimes even correspond with the celebrity or
their reps. Floyd Mayweather, whose net worth Warner estimates is perhaps the
most-Googled due to his infamous spending habits, has personally sent the site
screenshots
accounting for his assets.
“I’m not going to say that you should use the numbers that we have on the
site to the dollar in a court case,” Warner said. “But I would absolutely
say that we are the most accurate peg of a celebrity’s net worth at any
given time that you will
find on the internet.”
This line of questioning — how much celebrities are worth — is popular
enough that Warner was able to quit his day job in 2012 to focus solely on the
site. At its height, he said it had a 12-person staff.
Then Google happened.
For most of its history, Google was like a librarian. You asked a question,
and it guided you to the section of the web where you might find the answer.
But over the past five years, Google has been experimenting with being an
oracle. Type in a question, and you might see a box at the top of the search
results page with the answer in large bold type. When is Easter? Who won The
Voice? Can you give a dog
sushi?
Some of these answers include information sourced from a database that Google
curates called Knowledge Graph. That’s where most of the numerical and
date-based answers come from, as well as some searches that will pull an
answer from Wikipedia, a site
Google trusts.
But some of the answers aren’t curated, but are instead algorithmically
pulled from the web. These are called “Featured Snippets,” and they have
caused Google trouble in the past, as the search engine has inadvertently
highlighted answers are
racist, sexist, or blatantly false.
In 2014, Warner got an email from Google asking if he would be interested in
giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge
Graph, for free.
Here is an excerpt from the email:
> “We get a good amount of search queries about net worth of celebrities and
important people. I am tasked with finding an authoritative source, and
Currently am exploring sources for Net Worth of Celebrities datasets. The
ultimate goal is to enhance
user experience at Google Search [...] I was reviewing your website, and your
collection looks comprehensive… if you can share a small sample dataset in a
spreadsheet, perhaps 10 celebrities with metadata, that will help me/team
evaluate and see how it
fits within our schema.”
If approved, this meant that any Google search for a celebrity’s net worth
would return that pullout answer. The answer would include a link to
Warner’s site, and Google promised him it would be good for his brand. But
it would also drastically cut
his traffic. Most people just want the number; they aren’t as interested in
the breakdown of the math. So Warner said no.
“I didn’t understand the benefit to us,” he said. “It’s a big ask.
Like, ‘hey, let us tap into the most valuable thing that you have, that has
taken years to create and we’ve spent literally millions of dollars, and
just give it to us for
free so we can display it.’ At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re
not comfortable with this.’”
“But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.”
In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the
25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew
this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities
to see if they would
pop up as featured answers, and they did.
“Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016
(a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our
traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff.
(Google declined to
answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting
itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information.)
Celebrity Net Worth uses Google’s advertising network, so he tried reaching
out to Google through his advertising contact. No luck. He was doubly upset
when he realized that many of Google’s Featured Snippets didn’t credit
CelebrityNetWorth for its
work. Many of the links went to other sites, like the mortgage referral site
Bankrate.com, even though those sites cited CelebrityNetWorth as their source.
Warner acknowledged the risks in building a site that depends so heavily on
Google for search traffic, and whose research can easily be reduced to a
single number. But he still thinks what Google did is unfair. “If Featured
Snippets are here to stay,
that’s okay. I’ve made peace with that,” he said. “I one
hundred-percent think we should be credited for them.”
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