Comment by gameman144 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gameman144 | Hacker News Reader

My read on this is that news organizations are upset that Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content that makes people not want to actually click their links.

If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results.

Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.

> It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article. That's why publishers are serving the full, unpaywalled article to Google: how do you index an article you can't cache? The publishers—today—can simply serve the paywalled versions to Google.

The publishers want Google to keep a copy of their data to offer search services to Google's customers, but then want Google to pay for the privilege.

> If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article.

Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors. Might as well claim that wikipedia can't have articles covering movies without acting as the worlds largest piracy site.

> but then want Google to pay for the privilege.

On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.

> On the other hand Google wants all the articles for free, but doesn't have any motivation to share the users or ad impressions they attract.

AFAIK Google doesn't show ads on Google News, they don't show ads on news queries, and they send the users to the news site via the link. There is no revenue to share, and the users are being shared to the extent that is possible given they're humans who have free will and will decide themselves which articles to read and which not.

> Google can index the articles independently of serving their entirety to visitors

I don't know what you're referring to here. AMP? The news site has to do extra work to enable AMP, and the entire point of AMP was always the cache. (But the revenue from the ads on the AMP page goes to the publication, not to Google). The search cache? The news site can opt out. The snippet? They can opt out. Images? I'm pretty sure they actually have to opt in for that, by emitting specific meta tags. The title? That is mandatory, but for the simple reason that you have to give the searcher something or they won't click through.

That's sort of the thing, though: what you're describing isn't what publishers seem to be upset about or what Google is doing. In my entire life, I have yet to see Google put someone else's article on their site (with or without ads). Take a minute to look through Google News and show me where Google is republishing anything.

What's happening (afaict) is that Google is showing the excerpt of the article surrounding the user's query as they do with every other search result. The publishers are claiming "well, Google makes money from users searching for our stuff, therefore we should get a cut".

To borrow your analogy, the evolution of this bill is publishers demanding a share of Wikimedia donations because they use their articles as sources. Why should Wikipedia have revenue built on the reporting of a third party and not share it?

> Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article.

Yeah, this is exactly the point that such a regulation would bring up. Businesses can't expect Google to both use your data and not use your content in their search results.

If you say "I don't want Google's indexers to read my content and surface it to people that haven't clicked my site", that's fine -- Google won't be able to index your content (as requested), though, so your site won't appear in search results.

This seems like a situation where the cards are much more clearly on the table, and my expectation is that no reasonable business would choose to have Google not index their full content.

It is trivial, absolutely, absurdly trivial, for any site to opt out of Google caching.

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