Google’s Featured Snippets Are Destroying Small Businesses

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Staff member
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
You aren’t the only one who takes the “Featured Snippets” box for granted—so does Google. Imagine being asked by the search giant to give up your website’s information for their Knowledge Graph, telling them no (since it would be of no benefit to you and merely reduce your hits), but having them steal your data anyway and seeing your traffic destroyed. That is reportedly what happened to CelebrityNetWorth.com, and probably many others. Worse is that many of the snippets did not even link back to the appropriate site.

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.)
 
This article aside , Mark Hamill is only worth 6 Million $ ? what?
 
well that sucks.. isn't this part of some copyright of content? is google in violation or is this where they allow google to do this? primary content on a website should be somewhat under copyright protection..
 
Then you get no traffic whatsoever, or maybe the 4 people who use bing...

But people are not going to their website either way.
Anyway, Google should be compensating them for every search that directly grabs info from their site. When my phone spews out an answer from Wikipedia, they should be paid.
 
Hmm, reading that article it seems Google asked CelebrityNetWorth to be able to scrap snippets from them, they refused so Google found other sources.
CNW then got pissy when they started scraping from other sources (some of which mention/used CNW as their source). Then a few paragraphs about Larry David and them using information that doesn't seem have anything to do with CNW?

Edit: He also mentioned using fake names to see if they would popup as featured answers, but fails to mention any names or provide screen captures.
 
So let me get this straight...

Google isn't crawling the data from them. It's getting it from other websites who get it from them. If I Google's Harrison Ford's net worth and saw it on Banking Rate I really wouldn't give a shit that it came from CNW. I'd read the Banking Rate article and move on. So that still means no ad revenue for CNW from me in that instance. Also who here spends a few hours searching celebrities to see their estimated net worth? Not I. I don't think I've ever even Googled that before because frankly I don't give a shit. Bottom line is they all make more than me. :p

But Google is to blame? Yeah, something doesn't add up here.
Not to mention...Bing does do the same thing. But Google is the bad guy?

Sounds to me like a fundamental problem in their business model around data that most of the population probably doesn't really doesn't give a shit about.
 
I dont think Google is trying to do anything nefarious here, they just want to give users the content they want, but I suppose that is sort of out of bounds for Google. Theyre supposed to be a content locator, not a content provider. Typical search results tend to offer just enough info that you are compelled to visit the website to get the rest. The snippet offers just enough info that you already get what you need.
 
...Sounds to me like a fundamental problem in their business model around data that most of the population probably doesn't really doesn't give a shit about.

They had a business model, and then their visits dropped 65% in a month according to the owner. Let's assume he's correct and honest, then he seems to have a valid complaint. I've been to that website once, probably to settle a bet, and I remember browsing for a few minutes afterward, like going to TVTropes.com. That's probably what they're seeing. They don't get users in the door to spend more time.

Now, why does advertising make anybody money is beyond me. I can't think of a time when a typical sidebar advertisement actually resulted in me buying something. Who buys things without A) knowing they want something B) doing some comparison shopping.
 
But people are not going to their website either way.
Anyway, Google should be compensating them for every search that directly grabs info from their site. When my phone spews out an answer from Wikipedia, they should be paid.

People were going to their website before Google effectively scraped it by using it from second hand sources that did go there.
 
This is a chicken-egg problem. If other sites don't have stuff to scrape (because they go away) eventually Google won't have anyone to scrape from.

Interesting problem space.

Too bad everything is ad driven these days, instead of just good content driven (can't monetize that without ads unless you are just selling an awesome product, but nobody will find your product if you don't show up in searches- rinse repeat)
 
This is a chicken-egg problem. If other sites don't have stuff to scrape (because they go away) eventually Google won't have anyone to scrape from.

Interesting problem space.

Too bad everything is ad driven these days, instead of just good content driven (can't monetize that without ads unless you are just selling an awesome product, but nobody will find your product if you don't show up in searches- rinse repeat)

I would probably give up using internet if adblockers didn't exist. Not only they're (ads) dangerous as hell, they annoy.
 
So to summarize:
Google is stealing my (small business) ad revenue
Did i get that right?
How about, go suck an egg.
 
Google is turning an entire business model on its head by simply locating the end result that consumers are looking for ($$$ number) and making it a google snippet. It seems that they were doing this before celebritynetworth disabled the crawling, and now google is just pulling it from other sites that specifically credit celebritynetworth (so google's bots are relatively certain that is where the data is from) to get around it.

Question is, does Google have the right to display information like this as a snippet? Or is the work and ultimate number figure owned by celebritynetworth?
 
I don't think this is the first time Google has killed off a business by changing how their search results/algorithm works.
now google is just pulling it from other sites that specifically credit celebritynetworth (so google's bots are relatively certain that is where the data is from) to get around it.
Some of them did credit CNW, doesn't mean they all did. Since the article seems to love mentioning Larry David, Google is specially using a number that CNW doesn't use (400 vs 900 million).
Question is, does Google have the right to display information like this as a snippet? Or is the work and ultimate number figure owned by celebritynetworth?
Hard to tell, can you copyright a number?
 
I don't think this is the first time Google has killed off a business by changing how their search results/algorithm works.

Some of them did credit CNW, doesn't mean they all did. Since the article seems to love mentioning Larry David, Google is specially using a number that CNW doesn't use (400 vs 900 million).

Hard to tell, can you copyright a number?

Not sure, but if that figure is the product of a work or compilation you did, then yes I would assume copyright law would apply.
 
So let me get this straight...

Google isn't crawling the data from them. It's getting it from other websites who get it from them. If I Google's Harrison Ford's net worth and saw it on Banking Rate I really wouldn't give a shit that it came from CNW. I'd read the Banking Rate article and move on. So that still means no ad revenue for CNW from me in that instance. Also who here spends a few hours searching celebrities to see their estimated net worth? Not I. I don't think I've ever even Googled that before because frankly I don't give a shit. Bottom line is they all make more than me. :p

But Google is to blame? Yeah, something doesn't add up here.
Not to mention...Bing does do the same thing. But Google is the bad guy?

Sounds to me like a fundamental problem in their business model around data that most of the population probably doesn't really doesn't give a shit about.

The issue seems to be Google doing snippets of the site which is preventing the site from generating ad revenue. When you search for something Google tends to give you these brief answers to your questions in the form of snippets which is text extracted from the site. A site you would otherwise visit for information thus generating them ad revenue. Since google puts the text within the search there is now no need to go to the full site which drops traffic considerably. Makes sense that the webmaster would be pissed.
 

Attachments

  • net.PNG
    net.PNG
    182.2 KB · Views: 28
The issue seems to be Google doing snippets of the site which is preventing the site from generating ad revenue. When you search for something Google tends to give you these brief answers to your questions in the form of snippets which is text extracted from the site. A site you would otherwise visit for information thus generating them ad revenue. Since google puts the text within the search there is now no need to go to the full site which drops traffic considerably. Makes sense that the webmaster would be pissed.

I get that. I understand that piece. The problem I have is this and your picture is a perfect example:

CNW has the data.
CNN sources the data from CNW and puts it on their webpage.
Google crawls CNN for that data.
User searches for DiCaprio networth.
Google shows data from CNN.
CNW cries foul.

In the picture you posted it should be Time Warner/CNN that's pissed because they are the ones not getting the click through. CNW wouldn't be getting a click through there anyways because the user would get their information from CNN and then go about their business.

Google does this with so many things. Wikipedia doesn't seem to be crying foul about their stuff being shown in a snippet but then again Wikipedia may be shown in a snippet but there's far more data there on a Wikipedia page than Google will show. Where CNW shows a number. No more no less. Somebody wants to know Mark Hamill's net worth and CNW shows $6 million. Any other data at that point is superfluous and is outside the scope of the users search.

CNW's big problem is that they have a business model that requires ads and that is built around a data string that has less characters than a Tweet. Sorry...not a viable long term business model.
 
Back
Top