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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

The paradox is, if these companies fold, Google has to get the data from somewhere.

What's the paradox there? Google has its own review system for restaurants / hotels / etc., so they can definitely survive TripAdvisor and Yelp disappearing. They'll just collect the data themselves.

For Quora and StackOverflow, they can (and do) index personal blogs etc., too. Google is a search engine; they don't need a single fixed third party to be the first search result to all questions in a category.

The problem with Google is that everything is attached to your name. I never write any review on Google knowing that anybody can judge me based on that review alone. Reviews are between me and the target of the review. My coworkers don't need to know what I've bought, where I've been and all my opinions about those things.

People generally use their real name on sites like Quora, Yelp, Amazon, etc. and they seem to work fine. You can also choose to use a fake name pretty easily on these sites - or on Google.

Let's be honest. Your coworkers are not interested in your posts.

Of course they are. Especially if you happen to voice an unpopular political opinion that differs from the herd.

Just having a review site is missing the big picture. People want authenticity and trusted reviews. Google doesn't know if you really bought the Amazon item, booked the hotel through TripAdvisor, etc. Google can collect data, but is it any good if they do it themselves?

Do TripAdvisor or Yelp know if I really visited that restaurant or that hotel? Does Quora or StackOverflow know if I really worked on that project or studied that subject? Clearly, there's widespread public internet in reviews without the automated verification.

And if you want it, Google sees most credit card transactions. In 2017, they said, "Google’s third-party partnerships ... capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States." https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/05/powering-ads-and-anal... (Later reporting found a deal with MasterCard, at least.) So they could absolutely know if you bought the Amazon item or booked the hotel, if they wanted.

I wholeheartedly agree that there's a centralization concern about letting one company have so much power, but that doesn't change that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in another party being the review aggregator. If we can't figure out how to return control to the actual reviewers, Google is no worse of an aggregator.

> If I write the review on Google itself, I lose nothing.

There are distinct advantages to having a single cloud, with a single set of protocols/APIs/etc. The only issue I see is if Google starts filtering/blocking in a significant way, then the blocked communities will build their own infrastructure. But Google wouldn't want that data, since they are filtering it out in the first place, except perhaps to train their filters more accurately.

Make that corpus licensed with a Creative Commons license where commercial use requires compensation, but non commercial use is freely permitted.

How come they're not being sued over this?

Probably because nobody understands the ramifications of what Google is doing deeply enough to build a solid-enough case. Justice is slow, too slow for modern times and laws are inadequate.

If you sue them they’ll just remove you from the index. It’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation for Google.

Ianal, but an additional issue, is from my (limited) understanding, copyright applies to presentation not facts or the idea of something. If you take some info and reword it so the original presentation is gone and only the factual idea is the same, i think you are in the clear.

Again, ianal and dont really know what im talking about

They were sued by Rap Genius for a similar practice and I believe Rap Genius won.

I can't find anything about a lawsuit but they were using shady seo methods and Google deindexed them. Rapgunius stopped what they were doing and apologized for the dishonest behavior.

Looks like rap Genius hasn't filed suit as of yet. But they published the findings of their sting operation to prove that Google was stealing lyrics from their site. I must have been conflating two separate stories.

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