6 ms·

It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search. Google has pr

It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search. Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.

what 5d ago
You can opt out from Google scraping you though? In theory you can opt out of anyone scraping you (if people were well behaved). Google should get to opt out of being scraped too.
- InsideOutSanta 4d ago
  > You can opt out from Google scraping you though? You can't. Google will ignore robots.txt in some cases (e.g. "The REP isn't applicable to Google's crawlers that are controlled by users (for example, feed subscriptions), or crawlers that are used to increase user safety (for example, malware analysis)"). robots.txt is just a suggestion that Google loosely follows. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robots-txt-spec https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robot...
leobg 5d ago
This is the best explanation. They’ve been doing the same in Google News. Each entry comes not with a URL to the source, but with a hash. To resolve it, you must send requests to Google’s servers. Anyone who wants to create a list of URLs of sources automatically can therefore be blocked by Google now on two levels rather than one - the search for a list of results, and identifying the source URL for each result. In effect, they’re removing attribution from the content they quote from other people’s websites. It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is one thing to crawl other people’s websites and display snippets of their work as your search results when each result is properly and transparently attributed. But if the text is quoted and the source is not there alongside it in plaintext, replaced only by a vague promise that, if you ask, we may or may not tell you where this piece of content is from, that is a very different deal.
- Terr_ 5d ago
  > It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is also a measure of how enshittified and exploitative thing have become, that we look towards litigious copyright holders for assistance...

what 5d ago

You can opt out from Google scraping you though? In theory you can opt out of anyone scraping you (if people were well behaved). Google should get to opt out of being scraped too.

InsideOutSanta 4d ago
> You can opt out from Google scraping you though? You can't. Google will ignore robots.txt in some cases (e.g. "The REP isn't applicable to Google's crawlers that are controlled by users (for example, feed subscriptions), or crawlers that are used to increase user safety (for example, malware analysis)"). robots.txt is just a suggestion that Google loosely follows. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robots-txt-spec https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/robots-txt/robot...

leobg 5d ago

This is the best explanation. They’ve been doing the same in Google News. Each entry comes not with a URL to the source, but with a hash. To resolve it, you must send requests to Google’s servers. Anyone who wants to create a list of URLs of sources automatically can therefore be blocked by Google now on two levels rather than one - the search for a list of results, and identifying the source URL for each result. In effect, they’re removing attribution from the content they quote from other people’s websites. It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is one thing to crawl other people’s websites and display snippets of their work as your search results when each result is properly and transparently attributed. But if the text is quoted and the source is not there alongside it in plaintext, replaced only by a vague promise that, if you ask, we may or may not tell you where this piece of content is from, that is a very different deal.

Terr_ 5d ago
> It would be interesting to see if courts object to that. It is also a measure of how enshittified and exploitative thing have become, that we look towards litigious copyright holders for assistance...