Google pilots a feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok, Instagram | Hacker News Reader

Google pilots a feature that aggregates short-form videos from TikTok, Instagram

techcrunch.com

105 pointselsewhen75 comments

This is good news IMO, as it will promote discovery of creators from outside the platform they create on. As a content creator, I hope this feature ends up well implemented. I could totally see it going downhill though when the SEO-obsessives realize there's new territory to fight over. I guess I'll just wait and see!

SEO is a poor substitute for curation.

Well yeah but that doesn’t mean that search engines don’t have a useful function indexing video content. Being able to find “that TikTok where __” would be nice.

Huuuuuge opportunity for this.

You misspelled “profitable”.

This will kill any and all smaller platforms that would want to compete in this space.

For example, why not include COUB in search results, too (it appeared way before TikTok and is still reasonably popular)

I've never heard of it. Coub says it's youtube for video loops. Not sure that's the same.

I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites and sometimes it’ll embed a whole YouTube player. If anything, it’s good that they feature content from not-YouTube.

The “quality” of TikTok videos is not really important here because one might actually look for them.

Isn’t this against the license of those sites, though? I’m pretty sure you’re absolutely not allowed to crawl Instagram content let alone mirror their videos.

You implicitly give a license to crawlers if you don’t take action to block them via robots.txt or otherwise block them via your server. If you do either of these, google will respect the site’s decision and you probably could take them to court if they tried to evade blockers that block google bot (but since google always respects robots.txt and never craws from a different ASN or different user agent, even for safe browsing crawls, they’re fine).

So if Instagram wants to block google from downloading their videos, they can

  Disallow: /video/

(Or however their url scheme works)

Pretty sure crawling and scraping is legal even if there's a robots.txt.

As long as it’s public. If you need to bypass auth or similar, that’ll get you in trouble.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

I would assume Google isn’t just gonna try to start needless fights with Facebook’s lawyers, so it’s likely legal.

A more close example is how there's a Tweet carousel that can sometimes show up. I personally find that very useful. This is no different from that.

Imagine having a juggernaut so big and powerful you can no longer afford to innovate on the bottom.

Google was never able to build or buy a social platform to build their walled garden higher.

Instead they reach their tentacles over the other walled gardens and snatch the content.

Google is a shell whose moat is drying up day by day.

What are you talking about? They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable. That’s how Google started and got successful in the first place.

>They make a new type of content that is available on the internet searchable.

How is hijacking a website's search feature and putting it in front of "google.com" new type of content?

50/50 you read the article, so I will leave this here:

> Google is testing a new feature that will surface Instagram and TikTok videos in their own dedicated carousel in the Google app for mobile devices — a move that could help the company retain users in search of social video entertainment from fully leaving Google’s platform.

In short, it appears they scrape and display content from sites they don't own in an effort to keep people on their platform. This is anti-competitive, and any smaller player engaged in similar behavior would have the door shot on their fingers.

Google use help people find their way to interesting places. Now they seem more and more interested in keeping them in a walled garden.

No offense but did you read the rest of the article?

>Both Instagram and TikTok videos were available in the Short Videos row. When clicked, you’re taken to the web version of the social platform — not the native mobile app, even if it’s installed on your device. The end result is that Google users are more likely to remain on Google, as all it takes is a tap on the back arrow to return to the search results after watching the video.

at least they're taking you to the web version of the service they're presenting content from, so it's not like they just serve the content themselves. I don't see a problem with that.

Isn’t that just the app not registering URL handlers with the OS? I’ve clicked YouTube URLs before and it opens the YouTube app.

I recently noticed that some Google search results now load images associated from the content on the search results page when you hover over the search result link.

I have no doubt some users will find it helpful, but it is another example of Google extracting data/content from websites and then displaying it on their own platform making less people visit where the content originates from.

HN hate that Google gets has almost zero impact on Google’s mission to organize worlds information. It’s doing exactly that.

Usual complains about customer service, search ranking, etc are taken into account.

Google walked away from that mission years ago. More and more of their search results are not search results but rather ads.

That is not organized information as we were lead to believe.

Google is losing the war against SEO garbage but they’re not ads. Ironically for shopping results the ads are better at finding thing you’re looking for than the actual content. I suspect that the reason is that stores put more effort into actually sanely cataloging their stock for ad placements than for their main site.

I have definitely made searches on google on a 2015 macbook pro, only to see every link above the fold be an ad.

Google still offers utility but their dominance will be challenged by niche players (in aggregate) over the coming years.

I do not put a value judgement on their behavior. I merely comment on the opportunities presented when they become too big to innovate from the bottom.

Gut feeling says you're right, but their financial performance is extraordinary and based on selling not just ads, but so much more. Google Maps has literally the entire US mapped out in terms of street view, GSuite is such a bargain, GCP is up there with the three big cloud providers. I don't know what Verily life sciences is doing, there is also Waymo (no revenue), and Google X (moonshots).

Last time I checked, ads were literally something like 99% of Google revenue.

I just checked, you're right. I was looking at the Alphabet revenue (parent) and 82% comes from Google Ads. Thanks for the insight.

And the other 18% is probably "non-profitable" ads e.g. YouTube.

The other 18% is things like YouTube Premium/Superchats, Cloud, Android, etc...

...Google’s mission to organize the world’s monetizable information.

> Google was never able to build or buy a social platform to build their walled garden higher.

Does buying YouTube not count?

A fair point. That one is a blind spot for me because I do not use the social aspects of the platform.

Isn’t the vast majority of YouTube videos user-generated content?

I think social media implies there's more than one person involved, if you only watch videos and read no comments that's not really social media. The vast majority of Google search results is user generated content as well

Their mission statement is to index the internet and make it easily accessible. As a lot of internet shifts to Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, it would be a complete miss of their mission to not index and present that data.

Say I got a lease on an old satellite and started broadcasting 24 channels of tv made up of randomly selected youtube videos, with say 10min of ad per hour and overlays and etc etc.

How long before I and everyone I know are smoking holes in the ground with google lawyers pissing on any remaining sparks? Bets?

Anybody feel like investing money or effort in such a venture?

How would that make any money? Who's going to advertise on "random broadcast with no audience metrics"?

I hope they make this work, TikTok's search is absolutely useless. Making TikTok search work would be better since I'm usually trying to find a video I've already seen, but I'm still hoping Google can do something useful.

Is this a deal with the respective content silos or is there a public api for each?

In other words, is it possible for an independent developer to make their own content aggregator?

Pretty much never.

It’s not clear why TikTok and IG expose this content outside of their apps. Why would they do that?

Free advertising. The TikTok logo is on every video.

Another reason is more conversions. Now my friends may send me a TikTok which I view in the browser. Then I see a lot of prompts to get me into the app. They also try to show brief clips of other videos you might want to continue watching (I’ve noticed they can sometimes be somewhat sexual) to get you to finish them in the app.

This makes it that much more tempting to get it even when I’ve already decided to not create an account.

^ this. I’m not downloading your app just to view your content (remember when every Wordpress site had their own app?), but if I use your site enough, I’m more likely to download it.

Because everyone knows SERPs need more multimedia trash to fill up the above the fold.

As long as there's an option to disable it, (which to be honest, there probably won't be) I see no issue with this.

Personally, I quite enjoy having "multimedia trash" in my search results. I learn best from multimedia like videos and this feature sounds like it will be useful to me. I additionally enjoy showing my friends short videos I found entertaining, but frequently have trouble tracking down the exact video I want to show them.

To each their own! Happy New Year :)

Waiting for IG/TikTok to start aggregating content from YouTube...

IG/TikTok are not search engine with a mission statement about making the whole of the internet accessible

The battle between the open and closed web continues. Interesting to see the pendulum swing from google pushing amp stories to aggregating the dark web. Wrote more about whether social killed the open web here: https://blog.aesthetic.com/blog/is-web-dead/

didn't read the article so I don't know if it's addressed or not...

I think that newer generations are going toward reddit over facebook/instagram for text content. I might be wrong but it's my own experience talking with teenagers

I hope they are not using something like `youtube-dl` to scrape and download these videos to put them on their SERPs! /s

gasp Not that evil devil-tool, youtube-dl!

Don't say its name!

First rule of youtube-dl.

First rule is you don't talk about it!

Cute but it wasn't Google who attempted to take down the youtube-dl repository.

I feel like this will be a hostile move if their product gains traction. As soon as people start using “YouTube Shorts”/“Google Clips” more because that’s where everything is. Creators will start creating for that platform because it saves consumers a click.

Once this happens they’ll move to improve the format, then finally either shut down the aggregation, or relegate it to a separate product (Google Video Search vs YouTube).

It’s the standard open web playbook for Google/Microsoft/Facebook. We will see if they succeed.

if TT / IG retaliate with youtube excerpts in their UI, these companies are going to eat each other

Are there about to be scraping wars between the FAANGs?

That's such an interesting question! I wonder if each FAANG has all of the other FAANG's content indexed behind closed doors.

Wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Sounds like a smart idea!

little did we know when we fired the first shots that the scraping wars of 21 would lead to AGI

> When clicked, you’re taken to the web version of the social platform.

This seems like something that would drive more traffic to Tik Tok and Instagram. Why the heck would they retaliate?

Traffic is good, yes. But you don't want them to go to Google first to find their content. They want them to engage more on their platform. Otherwise this will give Google an edge as it allows them to know what kind of content people are interested in by tracking what people view on TikTok or IG.

Sure but I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between someone who’s searching for something specific on TT or IG and someone who’s on those sites to browse.

Google is the best way to find content on Reddit but if it wasn’t there it wouldn’t mean I aimlessly browse more.

My prediction is this will be less useful than twitter results in Google search. Btw, I like the direction of tiktok and ig videos being less walled garden. One thing I like about tiktok is that by default creators allow downloading the videos. There is so such option for youtube.

youtube has copyright content, I wonder how tiktak & ig deal with it..

This is all great but it reminds of a Netflix documentary social dilemma

As this clearly shows how companies fight for users attention so then can spend the most time on their app

Is there some agreement with Instagram and TikTok to be included here? Or are they just crawling and displaying?

it's the web, if TikTok/Instagram don't want it indexed, they can simply add noindex on the page.

Cue still more ugly tech company litigation in 10... 9... 8...

Almost no matter what is going on in the background, actually. Either Facebook sues them for copyright infringement or they have a deal and DOJ/the states work it into the antitrust fight.

Quite interesting, given that the anti-trust case against google stems from them doing these types of aggregations for other content.

Search indices aren't allowed to index public URIs anymore? Nobody else has this technology?

Unless Google makes some deals with TikTok and IG, for the use of copyrighted content, I don't see why Google should not deserve to get into legal trouble for doing this.

Please, don't get me wrong: I think US copyright law is criminal in and of its own (for plenty of reasons, even including international blackmail), but it is nonetheless actual (US) law, as it currently stands. Why would copyright law only apply to smaller players, yet not to Google? If that is not selective/arbitrary justice (therefore, no state of law), then what is?

I'm all for changing the status quo, but I doubt that this can ever be the right way. Especially considering Google's nature and track record.

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