Google to stop showing news snippets for French users

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-france/google-to-stop-showing-news-snippets-for-french-users-idUSKBN1WA1FK

by tannhaeuser • 7 years ago

256 265 7 years ago

reuters.com

pavelludiq• 7 years ago

Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany. It's not like this is any kind of surprise, it's the only logical thing that could've happened. I am still extremely bitter about the dirty way this law was passed, the lies, the deliberate lies by the commission, the nasty response EU politicians had at protesters and the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things. I watched the debates in parliament and there were MEPs who actually said that. The horsetrading France and Germany did over Russian gas in order to get a deal on this law. That disgusting blog post the EU commission published calling people who disagreed with them bots and brainwashed and positioning themselves literally as knights out to slay the google dragon. It's all horribly corrupt and cynical. I'm sure many young people got the message that their leaders view them with such absolute contempt and open hatred and I fear the consequences for Europe.

easytiger• 7 years ago

This. The EU proxy war against Ireland thrown in with this utterly corrupt approach to information companies is an utter embarrassment and fully demonstrative of the complete lack of oversight of a tiny handful of people.

pteraspidomorph• 7 years ago

There's been legislative elections since and not only was turnout a little better than usual, the major traditional alliances lost a lot of seats in the european parliament to the smaller less conventional ones on both sides of the spectrum. Still a long way to go but baby steps.

timwaagh• 7 years ago

It may be counterproductive but in a way those publishers always held the rights to their own work. Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to. But maybe that should be opt out, rather than opt in. I expect most of them to request Google to use snippets again before very long in any case.

kozhevnikov• 7 years ago

It should be a simple robots.txt setting (i.e. indexed but without snippets) available to any publisher and content creator in any country.

realusername• 7 years ago

They already can, they just leave the meta tags with an empty string and nothing will show up.

zmix3• 7 years ago

Consequently if they want to prevent Google from showing snippets they should be able to.

They were!

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

  <meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." /> 
  These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
  
  nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in 
  the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if 
  possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
  
  max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number] 
  characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.

kd5bjo2• 7 years ago

We don’t know how this plays out yet. This first step was quite predictable, but its effects on the overall news media landscape will take months to unwind. Will this increase the ad revenue for news sites because of increased clickthrough rates? Will it push them towards obscurity because their reporting is less available? Will it make no meaningful difference whatsoever?

sbx3203• 7 years ago

Google did the same thing in Germany after a similar national version was introduced. News sites quickly noticed a significant decrease in visitors coming from Google. They then attempted to sue Google to force them to list results with snippets AND also pay for it. Courts quickly ruled against that, so news sites just decided to allow Google to list the full results again.

The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue.

I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.

tannhaeuser7• 7 years ago

Excuse me, you find it ok that Google et al get all the ad money by republishing and publishers and content creators get nothing? And even go so far as spinning this into an EU corruption story, where the only alternative, and the one we're living through right now, is to rely on a monopolist for news?

Kiro2• 7 years ago

and content creators get nothing?

Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.

AnonymousPlanet8• 7 years ago

Could you please explain to me how Google is making money from showing a brief excerpt from a linked website. Especially "all the money". Before you answer, please consider where most of Google's revenue comes from. Is it from showing things on their search page or is it from their ad network? Making money from the latter requires people to actually click through to the site.

Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.

signal11• 7 years ago

Content creators get click throughs. And while I’m not sure if this is specific to me in the UK, news.google.co.uk has no ads.

Google News presents an aggregated view of online news. Because of Google’s reach, news.google gets a lot of page views and results in a lot of click-throughs to the actual publisher. Facebook is a similar source of traffic although that’s driven by social sharing. In both cases, publishers benefit a lot assuming they can monetise those page views.

I’m not a big fan of Google but Google News isn’t the “bad guy” here.

sacado22• 7 years ago

Strange to hold such a position on a news aggregator like HN.

the_mitsuhiko• 7 years ago

Congratulations to the EU commission and the EU parliament on achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do despite being told this would happen and despite it actually already happening in Spain and Germany.

I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.

ekianjo• 7 years ago

what is happening is exactly what the EU wants.

No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.

Semaphor• 7 years ago

No, not even close. Just like in Spain, where they passed a law forbidding publishers to allow google to show snippets for free.

thunderbong• 7 years ago

I'm sorry, I don't have a clue what you're talking about.

simias2• 7 years ago

Your reaction is over the top IMO. I'm quite perplex about this law myself but I think you're missing the point.

You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations.

I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things

I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.

cameronbrown9• 7 years ago

No. The vast majority of the informed peoples of the EU campaigned and pleaded them not to pass Article 13. The fact they turn around and basically call us too stupid to know what's best is just icing on the cake. They ignored the people.

Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.

AnonymousPlanet8• 7 years ago

but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

Why do you think the EU constituents had anything to do with these laws? The laws were incentivised by the publishers. The crux in the EU is that the biggest part of the industry see the internet just as infrastructure and couldn't care less about net neutrality, censorship, equal access, or ad revenues. The only industries affected by those issues are tech companies and publishers.

The tech companies have a pro liberalisation stance while the publishers hate the internet's guts. Now guess where countries with strong and influential publishers and a nearly non existent tech industry are leaning to. That publications like Süddeutsche, Zeit, and FAZ have been portraying the internet as a bad and dangerous thing for decades now, doesn't help.

_the_inflator• 7 years ago

Nope. I side with Google. Why should they pay for Agency content brandet as high quality newspaper content? Why only newspapers? This is blackmailing google.

This is using law to grant the lobby of newspapers additional revenue. And blame Google for not abiding.

kiba2• 7 years ago

You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations.

How exactly google will suffer? It seems to me that Google is the party that can afford to walk away and that the French news media cannot.

Kiro2• 7 years ago

but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future.

Reconsider what? What is Google doing wrong here exactly?

tylerl3• 7 years ago

...they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future...

Google loses literally nothing.

Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads. It's just a free service.

The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.

This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never any money to share.

MrBuddyCasino• 7 years ago

but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done

This is exactly the problem. X was something, therefore it had to be done, although it was utterly pointless.

This is everything that’s wrong with politics.

gmueckl• 7 years ago

No, a lot of politicians amd lobbyists in favor of that reform had arguments that were maybe relevant 30 years ago, completely missing how media consumption has changed. And when called out, their response was deliberately hurtful, full of contempt and belittling those who - in their view - had no effin idea what this was about when in truth, even Axel Voss, the architect of the copyright reform gave factually wrong explanations of the contents of the regulation.

The politicians who were pushing this through were deliberately breaking just about every rule of civil political discourse. This is all on the record. Such behaviour it is completely out of line, but I don't know how to counter it effectively when those responsible for it have more political power and have better contacts in the media to have their views (and, in this case, lies) reported.

graeme• 7 years ago

You're failing to consider that the EU acted utterly irrationally.

The news isn't an important business for google and it doesn't get its revenue from their.

In a strike, the employer has pressure to relent because workers have a thing the employer values.

But what does Google have at stake in this situation? Why on earth would they pay to link to news? Why are news links special?

dmitrygr• 7 years ago

Why would Google suffer? Google News runs no ads and makes no money.

donohoe• 7 years ago

I agreed with EU on GDPR but I have to agree with @pavelludiq here.

It’s an understandable move by google to a short-sighted law.

I’m VERY sympathetic to publishers - I work for them but this is a BS move

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.

Really? Because only the Commission can propose laws and the Commission is not elected. Even MEPs get really low voter turnouts in many EU countries, because people feel that MEPs don't mean anything. I can understand it too, because MEPs seem to vote in blocs and what the people want seems to be entirely irrelevant.

jorvi• 7 years ago

I mean, let's not pretend this only happens in Europe. Pinterest sued Google and got the amazing 'view image' button taken away. Didn't even take something as mighty as federal government interference.

kinkrtyavimoodh• 7 years ago

It was Getty Images that sued Google.

Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.

lumberjack• 7 years ago

Why is this bad? The further away Google is from news coverage, the better. They have the power to be extremely manipulative.

bsaul2• 7 years ago

I'm really on your side. However, note that we (assuming you're european too) are in such a shity place because we've got 0 internet giants in Europe, and so we have really no good option between tax or laissez-faire

threatofrain2• 7 years ago

A large portion of savvy web users are ready to switch search engines on a snap if a superior value proposition comes along; if you build it (well) they will come. The same is 10x as true for news sources.

makomk2• 7 years ago

It's not just the EU and its institutions pushing that narrative either. For example, before the European elections the BBC ran an article about all the great things the European Parliament has done which gave it credit for this and described the controversy as follows: "Supporters say the rule helps to ensure that artists, musicians and other creators are fairly compensated. But tech companies say it will destroy user-generated content." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48024400

No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.

raverbashing5• 7 years ago

While the BBC is certainly decaying in quality and balance with each passing day, I think those deals might have surfaced after the vote happened.

No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government

Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)

pas8• 7 years ago

Could you please elaborate on the voting fiasco thing?

buboard10• 7 years ago

Its not like the alternative is better. They have the choice of slowly bleeding to death vs severing the hand. Its not clear which is best.

There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news

workaway2• 7 years ago

Having fewer options for getting news is an upside?

Traubenfuchs2• 7 years ago

Users will have less incentive to click on links without a little preview. Publishers will scratch their head about numbers getting worse. Smart publishers will enable previews. Soon, everyone will enable previews.

Well done!

iMerNibor• 7 years ago

Soon, everyone will enable previews.

Only on the big websites though, why would a news org bother with small or tiny news aggregators?

The small websites will have to shut down while google will get even stronger. (This happened in germany already when they introduced a very similar law)

Traubenfuchs2• 7 years ago

I do not know about the technical details. Is it more effort than putting something in your robots.txt or putting a meta tag in your HTML?

tannhaeuser7• 7 years ago

It still remains to be seen whether news sites get more actual clicks from direct visits vs getting nothing from clicks on Google properties (via snippets/link previews and AMP). Data of the past ain't conclusive being from isolated country-specific actions whereas copyright reform is eventually implemented in all EU member states.

ru999gol2• 7 years ago

I fail to comprehend why this being done across the EU is supposed to make any difference? Its not like there were competing news outlets across the EU due to the language barriers. What after the EU implemented it and it still isn't magically working how you deluding yourself into? We just have to make it international then? No its exactly as foolish as everyone with half a brain has been saying and warning everyone for years and its only hurting smaller EU internet companies (if there are still any at all left under the many disastrous EU decisions).

nobodyshere• 7 years ago

I find it really awkward. Are they that blind?

buboard10• 7 years ago

Not so sure. Look at the US situation: most of the news results you click on are now paywalls. Is it a better that people just read the google snippet and don't even bother further? Publisher gets nothing, and i read less US media now. In the end i m not sure this one is not more profitable.

The reality of the situation is this: there is a lot of money in advertising. Google is sucking all of this ... and recently even more than ever. Google should go back to being the gatekeeper that gives a lifeline to content sites. Honestly , i think it's stupid for google to be trying to make itself a content site, it's a self-destructive strategy. It's sad that it has to be done with legal action.

rq1• 7 years ago

Almost there... just a small effort and Google News will look like Hacker News.

tastroder3• 7 years ago

I really wish traditional news media, aka those people that are supposed to dissaminate the news, would get a grip and stop breaking the internet and their core business altogether one of these days. If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers. But no, instead of better content and easier ways to consume it, we get more clickbait and whining about fake news.

At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.

lotsofpulp3• 7 years ago

Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time?

Or is it an entire field of people being lazy and wanting easy money that caused it to go down the drain?

There exist “journalists” that write clickbait and content that wastes time. There are also journalists that risk their life and limb to gather and disseminate important information for society.

Clearly, it’s a difficult problem to address. The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. The journalists need a steady source of income to feed their families, and to incentivize people to become journalists. There’s a myriad of other issues as well, but it’s not a simple “the entire news media field is a bunch of bad actors”. They’re not paid well as it is, and I don’t see many people clamoring to take on the risks that real journalists do for the money they do it for, so there must be an issue on the revenue side as well.

AmericanChopper2• 7 years ago

It’s really just a simple supply and demand curve. A certain number of people have a demand for particular publications at a price of $0, and a significantly smaller groups of people have a demand for those publications at any price greater than $0.

The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad.

This just sounds mightily smug to me. People like things that you don’t think they should like, but if only they were as educated as you are, they would share your correct tastes and world view?

tastroder3• 7 years ago

I didn't want to imply your last paragraph and I'm certainly one of those willing to pay for journalism. My critique lies solely with publishing houses and companies behind journalists that don't keep up with the times. I don't think it's simple either but if we can agree on that I'd suggest it's not as simple as a general "there's free content now, let's screw journalists over" attitude either. In all honesty I feel like journalism and journalists are almost an afterthought when I look at most of the news I'm offered these days and if that's the case why would I blame anybody to take the free option?

Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time?

While the short answer might be yes, I'm not sure how to argue against that point without whataboutism. The world, and especially how it's people consume information, changed in the last few decades, I don't see these companies adopting, most of them seem to be fine with a senseless defence of a status quo they would never be able to build up today. Business models come and go, an industry as large as mainstream news media can't get their act together and figure out a model that people are willing to pay for. Instead they cripple innovation by lobbying for legislation like the one discussed in the article.

tl;dr: If news outlets let themselves get killed by the inevitable death of print media I just don't see how that's the people's or the internet's fault. They have enough collective resources to come up with an alternative.

tannhaeuser7• 7 years ago

This isn't about paywalls vs free news, but ad money going to Google rather than content creators.

wcoenen2• 7 years ago

it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim

I've also been thinking about this, with all the paywalls I've been running into. I don't mind paying for quality news, but I'd prefer to pay one entity for a certain article/month limit for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources. The one entity could distribute my subscription money to the news providers pro rata, according to my consumption.

The current system of paying for one news source doesn't work for me, because I want to read articles from all over. I don't consume enough from one source to justify the subscription cost.

OJFord• 7 years ago

I gather that's how Brave browser and Patreon-like (though not Patreon I don't think) work - but of course the problem is exactly what you hint at:

for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources

They only work where they work.

The only way I can ever see it happening is with an IETF standard that browsers pick up (perhaps using it as an opportunity to be the one entity you pay, and collect a fee) gradually convincing publishers to support this modern web standard.

JohnStrangeII4• 7 years ago

Interesting. This probably exists already in one form or another, but it could also be good opportunity for a major startup. "Netflix for news" - premium access to the best articles from the best newspapers and news agencies, with sophisticated A.I. powered recommendation system, custom content subscriptions, instant access wherever you are.

krapht• 7 years ago

This service exists, it is called Blendle.

hrktb• 7 years ago

If you lose revenue because google shows a few sentences of the introduction your content is not worth it to readers

Arguably the very fact that Google finds it worth to display content on the search result proves the contents value. Why show it if it’s worthless ?

I agree on the pricing of subscription, but it doesn’t justify Google acting as a middleman.

theamk3• 7 years ago

It doesn’t have to, any website can opt out - but they don’t. And when they made it opt-in in Germany, the same publishers who pushed for the law, opted in anyway.

Why do you think it is?

shkkmo15• 7 years ago

Google uses snippets because they lead to more click throughs and more total page views. There are no ads on Google News so Google ONLY makes money when users click through to the publishers' page and are shown ads because, Google's monopoly on adversiting means that most on page ads involve paying Google)

SomeOldThrow3• 7 years ago

Honestly I’d rather google stopped with this knowledge base/metadata extraction and focused on search. They’re trying to be star trek but they’re more like a concierge for existing businesses, and they aren’t much help where there isn’t existing capital investment. It’s parasitic.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Stop breaking the internet how? This only affects newspapers. There was a time when the internet didn’t have newspapers. Maybe it shouldn’t

chvid• 7 years ago

How the eu fights American big tech. Compare it with how China fights American big tech ...

mola• 7 years ago

Good, I believe media outlets will benefit, unless Google deliberately undermine their business model in some way. As a deterrent for others.

jeroenhd• 7 years ago

Reminds me of when news publishers tried to do the same in Germany and then lamented the drop in click through rate.

Lobbyists for magazines and newspapers got the EU to put this law into effect and I'm glad they're going to be the ones who suffer the worst. If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

I agree with the gist of your comment, but:

If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.

Major scoops that require many man-months of digging can often be summarized in just a headline.

AnonymousPlanet8• 7 years ago

Everything can be summarised in just a headline, including your or my life. But I doubt your life can be explained in just a thumbnail or headline.

smueller1234• 7 years ago

Not in a useful way, I don't think.

If that was the case and if it was a real problem, newspapers and magazines wouldn't want to be displayed at news agents either.

bagacrap• 7 years ago

Based on the number of times I'm browsing HN (a community of smart, well read and educated individuals) and read a question that's answered by TFA I don't believe interesting content can be summarized in a headline. Especially when it comes to science journalism, distilling a new study and all its subtleties into a one liner often does more harm than good.

oaw-bct-ar-bamf• 7 years ago

I am in favour of this. If a site is doing the work of providing content (news, sport game scores, weather, ...) and Google passes by, scrapes the most important information and shows it on their own site, a large swath of users will never visit the content provider.

The one providing the content has rights to his content.

chmod775• 7 years ago

I'm wondering whether you're also in favor of disallowing journalists to basically create blogspam copies of other, real journalist's, work?

Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2 sentences with a link to the article? Not so much.

As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending users their way.

SomeOldThrow3• 7 years ago

What do you mean by disallowing? Regulation is extremely specific for a reason. If it works, yea, that would substantially raise the quality of reporting. Google just seems trivially regulatable compared to “journalists”.

jasonvorhe• 7 years ago

There's robots.txt to prevent that and Google will respect that.

SomeOldThrow3• 7 years ago

That doesn’t give the consumer any power here. It should be trivial to disable this metadata scraping feature. It doesn’t improve results so why should i support this?

AnonymousPlanet8• 7 years ago

Please explain to me how Google makes money by keeping them on their search site. Google's revenue comes from ads. Not from the few link ads on their search site but from ads on other people's websites. Google has a strong incentive to make people click on those news article links, because it's behind the link they are making money.

Oletros2• 7 years ago

They have the rights, they only need to use robots.txt

test65542• 7 years ago

They can simply put up a paywall and set their pages to “do not index.”

ifthenelseend• 7 years ago

EU is the nightmare for every startup with all that laws. No time to develop the product, because there is a lot of bureaucracy that take all your time.

simion3144• 7 years ago

So Google should be allowed to grab your content and put it on their page - but if you make a video of yourself and put it on youtube and a car with the stereo appeared for a few seconds in it your video is claimed. It is like all the laws that make big companies money are good and the ones that make the same big companies less money are bad.

cameronbrown9• 7 years ago

Hang on, the issue you have with copyright claims is made far worse by EU law..

cromwellian2• 7 years ago

Google is not the one issuing takedown requests on YouTube for music in the background.

This whole concept of a small sample of something violating copyright IMHO is the death of culture, it's excessively injecting chilling effects and barriers into information sharing. We went through this in the 80s with Hip-Hop artists and sampling.

I mean, if my son quotes a paragraph out of a French news website for a term paper, and that paper is published online, is it now a copyright violation? When does text summarization down to 2-3 sentences violate copyright? How far do we take this?

The publishers business models are collapsing, but their foray into hyper monetization and litigiousness surrounding any use of what they publish, if anything, will only serve to speed up they're demise.

We have to find alternate models to support local journalism, and this ain't gonna help.

danShumway2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.

PyroLagus4• 7 years ago

Opting out is a trivial technical matter. You could even completely opt out of their search engine indexing if you so desire.

Avamander• 7 years ago

Welcome to the maturing stage of an industry, has happened to pretty much every industry out there.

xorcist• 7 years ago

This would have been a logical part of robots.txt from the beginning. Under an earlier Google this would probably not have been allowed to escalate this far.

theboulevardier• 7 years ago

Google has also started classifying non-news sites as being news sites and no removing snippets from them. I have already had to manually change the designation in the Google Search Console on a couple of sites that I look after this week after Google flagged them. I'd recommend that site owners check in the search console to see if they are affected.

buboard10• 7 years ago

This is good. More clicks to the news sites and google is more like Reddit now. But it is sad that there had to be a law for that. Gooogle should give the option to remove anything but the title from the page result (is this possible?).

jhall14683• 7 years ago

Less clicks. Much less. It's exactly what happened in Germany. They "won" and then saw their Google click-through rate plummet, which was a significant % of their click-throughs.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Less clicks through search for sure. This however may render google news useless, and increase direct traffic instead

Klathmon• 7 years ago

Google already did give the option of publishers controlling the way their content shows in places like Google news, including multiple controls over if the snippets are shown, how much text can be shown, whether the google cached link should be shown, and more.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

lettergram3• 7 years ago

After reading the comments (on HN) and the law I think this is a good thing. I’m rather confused by the visceral response by some people on HN.

It may be an unpopular opinion, but Google was stealing. They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. What this means for content creators is that you couldn’t make revenue.

If I search for something on Google I get so much information above the fold (and ads), I pretty much never see a real site. That’s a serious issue, because Google isn’t creating that content. Worse, their using their monopoly to push the AMP framework to make it easier to get snippets and actually serve your content on their servers.

No, this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Almost all decent sized websites add their own preview and snippets (which Google can display). So all it does is enable further controls to publishers.

sbx3203• 7 years ago

They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links.

Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the opposite seems to be true.

Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80% drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.

lettergram3• 7 years ago

I mean, those claims are anecdotal at best and more importantly Google controls what people see, which is kind of my point. You can’t validate Google isn’t manipulating results. They have every incentive to manipulate them.

I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?

lando2319• 7 years ago

Google was stealing

Anyone can set a robot.txt to nosnippet and there ya go, no snippet.

pas8• 7 years ago

Probably the correct argument is that Google is a monopsony here. Unless all publishers form a cartel (very unlikely) there will always be one that can enable the snippet and get all them clicks. (Ignoring whether this is good/bad for end-users, how this would effect the market.)

Now, did this law/regulation/policy-change help with that?

No, because there are still and probably will always be other news sites that enable the snippet preview feature. So Google is not incentivized to spend more on news snippets. (Ignoring whether they otherwise would, since they likely don't make money on them anyway.)

test65542• 7 years ago

If you see the internet as a source of information, then where you ultimately get the correct information is inconsequential.

If you see the information as property of someone then this is problematic, but it’s no different from a subscriber of the newspaper telling his colleagues about a big story he read. Just at a larger scale.

buboard10• 7 years ago

Inconsequential doesn’t equal worthless. Curation of information has value even if the info is freely available. But it s not inconsequential. Reading 10 good investing articles instead of 10 earnings reports saves time and money, which is quite consequential

danShumway2• 7 years ago

They were showing enough information [that] no one was clicking the links.

This is a testable claim. If snippets were preventing people from clicking the links, then publisher revenue should rise now that Google isn't showing any information.

Now, keep in mind that every single time this experiment has been tried in Europe in the past, publisher revenues plummeted. But maybe this time will be different.

theamk3• 7 years ago

I think people hate the decision because there were trivial technical measures to prevent snippets already, for years.

Those companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to sue google... instead of spending trivial amount of engineering time to just put the right tag on their page.

So I don’t think “Google was stealing” argument holds water - if this was really the problem, then the solution does not make sense.

detaro• 7 years ago

Part of the reasons for the response is that many people predicted what would happen. Other countries tried it before, the predicted thing had happened there. But the publishers got their way, and now are complaining that the predicted thing happened, and not their fantasy that Google would start paying them.

nkkollaw• 7 years ago

Not that Google News is any good. My newsfeed is basically far-left propaganda.

I would almost go as far as to say that this is a good thing for France.

remotecool• 7 years ago

This is why more countries need to break away from the EU.

skybrian• 7 years ago

I'm a bit confused by this because Google News has only been showing headlines since their last redesign. I guess they will stop showing images as well? I think that would be an improvement.

dghughes• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the daily posting on reddit in the GPDR subreddit. People are shocked that the countries outside the EU are not respecting the GPDR. Or more shocked that a website would rather not do bushiness with or block people in the EU from seeing their website. Most times a website put up bannersaying "yadda yadda cookies...privacy...agree/disagree?" and that's that.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner and all over the world.

pkaye• 7 years ago

The change means French users will only see the headlines and not the first few lines or a thumbnail image for news content unless European publishers specifically request to show previews, the company said.

I'm guessing some publishers will give permissions and eventually forcing others to follow suit when they start losing traffic.

rendall2• 7 years ago

Google is still a new phenomena, and we are still trying to come to terms with it as a society. It's the first global monopoly, and it's on information. Holy cow, that's just strange.

I applaud the EU for at least attempting to grapple with the potential existential threat that Google represents, rather than rolling over and pretending nothing is wrong as the US does; or censoring, as China does. Even though I think the specific solution is probably unhelpful, it's much better than pretending that everything is as it should be, and crowing when newspapers get their "comeuppance" when Google punishes them by reducing their traffic.

buboard10• 7 years ago

The US is not pretending; there is actually nothing wrong because googld is a US business. EU is following china here, building a covert great firewall in an attempt to resurrect local market. A little too late though

rendall2• 7 years ago

You didn't address the main point. So to expand on it, Google is effectively an information monopoly, which means that it uses its market dominance to restrict competition. Moreover, it also uses its position to influence the web and public opinion itself in ways for which there is no precedent. The US is not addressing this last aspect in any respect.

Not sure what Google being an American company has to do with that.

riclad1• 7 years ago

This law is pointless , it was tried in germany and spain, result,google news closed down. google news provide a service , free , no ads. if a newspaper wants to get paid for links or snippets, it should expect that most websites will opt out. The result is less traffic to newspaper websites, see google reader, google plus etc no one can force google to provide a service, even if it has millions of users. If it does, not fit in google,s plans the service will disappear . IT WOULD Be disastrous if google actually paid for a snippet, IT,S , a slipperly slope, next thing is google will have to pay to link to Any european news or list them in the search results. Say i,m looking for news on brexit, i should not have to go to 30 different websites, going to google news is a much better option.

The european newspaper companys remind me of of music companys in the 90,s , they were facing declining sales of cds, , music piracy, they launched apps or various mediocre incompatible music service,s with drm some of which only worked on phone,s or pc,s or various devices, and used various , It required steve jobs to appear and apple to invent the ipod and itunes , a simple service ,buy music, buy albums, ,1 song for 99 cents ,all music in mp3 format. Then streaming came along and the music industry is actually making more money every year as people get used to paying subscriptions for apple music, spotify etc The News industry needs a tech genius to come along who knows how the web works , what users want, what they will pay for , Maybe have a website, New,s .fr, news,germany.com, news,spain.com etc Where any news paper or blog can post links to news storys or any article. WIth ads if they want , Any news paper with a website can post on the website, it would be run by a semi independent board, so its not under the control of just one company .

andrerm• 7 years ago

How does Google rank pages with and without nosnippet?

Google to stop showing news snippets for French users

Related Stories