Google, the star company of the parent Alphabet that shares a name with the search engine that turns out to be its star product, a few years ago was guided by the following motto: don't be evil. That is to say, do not be evil. That was before the times of the constant need for profit to justify its value to investors.
Today we have constant criticism of the YouTube algorithm that in search of engagement and addictive behaviors, is partially responsible for the low intelligence in democracy at the international level, since by keeping active users they are exposed to junk content that could radicalize younger users. Definitely something far from the don't be evil which guided the first decade of the two thousand for the Mountain View firm.
Another notable aspect for which Google is criticized, is for using the power of its search engine (which has more users and profits than the other great defendant: Facebook) to elevate sites without much criteria and morals (again, the algorithm) and also to destroy the business of a few others thanks to the suggestions of results in the form of information cards that are basically avoiding sending traffic to sites with specific functions.
For example, a common search, looking for the height of a celebrity before would have led us to some database (with fed up programmatic ads) but now few will visit the site that was given the task of collecting it, since the crawler Google Search basically combs the internet to answer those kinds of questions.
Of course, there are more useful and specific cases. Long ago, there were a dozen websites with high traffic for converting foreign currencies, now the same search engine offers answers:
It is in this spirit that the startup Genius (before Rap genius), the song lyrics app that also offers editorial commentary on them, is suing Google for allegedly having taken the contents of its site without permission to offer them as immediate information in the multi-featured search smart cards, such as the one for the converter. international currency.
Although Genius has a tumultuous history with Google, since they were suspended for manipulating the results via SEO in a particular way, this time an audit would be revealing that indeed their contents (letters or lyrics of songs of all kinds, as a database) are practically copied and pasted within the quick search.
Another asterisk to the matter is that Genius had previously illegally taken some lyrics From the typical 1.0 websites with song lyrics!, so they were forced to license expensively with the administrators of those pages.
With that clear, the real note is the quirky way Genius legally confirmed that Google was taking the lyrics from the same private database.
The article indicates Google & #39; s lyrics provider was doing the scraping. Pitting as a David v. Goliath fight makes it more newsworthy, but the truth is likely plain and boring. It does seem that Google should have looked into their provider when Genius started complaining though.
- Arthur B. ? (@ArthurB) June 16, 2019
Through the intentional modification of the apostrophes in the lyrics of the songs ('¨, «) Genius generated a kind of code with interpretations that anticipated the copypaste from a third party, in this case Google.
What actually happened is that Google was negligent with previous reports of the Genius directive, thus allowing its provider of lyrics be exposed as the one who copied the lyrics from Genius.
To be slightly more precise after digging in a bit: Google evidently claimed that their lyrics supplier LyricFind had generated the content themselves, and didn't diligence this. Looks like some LyricFind curator was just copy / pasting from the Genius site.
- Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) June 16, 2019
This is how Genius has strong evidence to show that Google is cutting traffic from niche websites by putting results from smart cards, and worse, with content for which Californians did not pay a penny, as the case lyrics directly from Genius.
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