Caroline & Craig Makepeace

@yTravelBlog @CapitalOne That is bad customer relations! Can you help @AskCapitalOne ?

@yTravelBlog @CapitalOne Prett sure they will fix it 100%.

This is an exceptional thread and conversation that @natejhake started. In essence, Google took his images (some including him!) and his content, created snippets out of it in SERPs and basically generated a scenario where a search user doesn’t even have to go to his site to get an answer USING HIS CONTENT. Clearly, that’s a “win” for the search user and a win for Google (they still surface ads on the SERPs page), but for Nate, that’s devastating. Google’s claims that their focus on providing better results and experiences for search users is probably true and fair. But there is a hierarchy. If the search user is at the apex of the hierarchy, then the content creator that services the users information needs comes next. But unfortunately, like all companies that get stupidly large, Google has started to routinely forget its place in the hierarchy. It is third. Search User Knowledge/Info Creator Google But that’s not how Google now sees itself because it believes it can create knowledge and information too. So now, in Google’s model it’s: Search User Google Info Creator That’s broken. Quite badly. It leads to intellectual property theft and bordering on plagiarism. It’s been coming for awhile, but it seems like AI has accelerated it considerably. At some point, this is going to backfire. I’m not sure how or when, but it is inevitable. At some point, Google is going to need an awakening about what it is doing with search and pivot back to being a service provider that connects people with information creators’ websites. Google was never intended to be the place where you GET the information and especially not get the information essentially scraped and reposted almost verbatim from other people. It feels like a line has been crossed by Google over the last year or so. A line where the argument of “good faith” breaks down. It not longer feels like they are indexing, scraping, and cataloguing the internet to help people find things but instead it feels like they are doing those things to prevent people from leaving Google while still making ad revenue while not referring traffic. The middleman has misunderstood its place. It now sees itself as the creator and the people who create the information as merely the “middleman” to be exorcised from the user experience. That’s a perversion of the purpose of Google in my eyes.