I disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results.
You put a resource on an open network and don't use any of the standard, recognized methods to indicate don't index, don't share, (nor lock it away with auth).
It's like if you put a sculpture in front yard and get upset when someone points it out in their neighborhood tour company, even worse cause yard ornaments don't have standard accepted methods of saying "don't use".
You put a resource on an open network and don't use any of the standard, recognized methods to indicate don't index, don't share, (nor lock it away with auth).
This is the kind of argument people used to use as they flagrantly violated your copyright by cloning your article on their own site. "You put it on the Internet, so it's free for everyone to copy."
The law says no such thing, at least not in any jurisdiction that I'm familiar with. Contrary to popular belief in some quarters, normal laws do still apply on the Internet.
If you infringe copyright, it's still infringement even if what you copied was freely available on someone else's site.
And if you state something that is misleading and harmful, it might still be defamation, even if what you stated was just an automatically generated snippet that takes a small part of someone else's site and shows it out of context.
Nah. Take it easy here, there is a long way between indexing and showing the most relevant hit and outright lifting big parts out of the site and use them on their own property:
It is more like if the guide that used to send visitors to your property has set up their own boot on the best spot on the sidewalk next to you and are raking in money because of the useless (often, in the last few years) ads they have plastered all over it.
Even if it is an educational non-profit resource you don't want that as some of the details get lost when visitors only reads the guides summary instead of taking a closer look for themselves.
And according to people on this thread they will also complain and/or come with suggestions about how you can make it even more useful to them.
I think of it more as if you put a banner with content somewhere in the public, and I take a photo of it, what can I later do with that photo?
And for that, it's a question of copyright. It turns out, in the US, if something is publicly available it does not make the copyright a part of the public domain. Thus the original author still retains copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise.
There is an exception to this though, which is called fair use. And for that, I'd recommend reading this: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/411058/ Book snippets by Google searched were deemed fair use.
So the question remains, would website snippet similarly count as fair use? What will the federal courts rule be? And when it comes to fair use, that's the only way to know if it is or not.
It's worth pointing out in this context that the US legal concept of fair use is not universal. In fact, unusually for US IP laws, it's actually much more permissive than most other places. The more usual practice is to enumerate specific situations where copying without the copyright holder's consent is still allowed, instead of defining general tests, which is how fair use works. This has been a controversial point, because it's not clear that the US scheme is sufficient to meet its obligations under international treaties.
In answer to your final question, I'm not sure whether this use of snippets in search engine results has been tested in any US courts yet, but the issue of search engines showing enough content from the sites they link to that users never actually go through to the original site is sufficiently controversial that the EU's recently passed copyright directive includes specific provisions aimed at exactly that sort of situation.
> It is more like if the guide that used to send visitors to your property
Here is where your argument falls apart. The web is a public space - it's not your property or your front yard. It's more akin to going to the town square wearing a fancy hat and getting upset if people look at you and your weirdly shaped headwear.
The web is a public space - it's not your property or your front yard.
You're wrong here. Just because it's a public space does not mean nobody owns the property. As a simple example, a shopping street is usually a public place. That does not mean that all window displays, doorways and adjacent buildings are automatically a free-for-all.
In fact, only "the tubes" of the web are a public space. The rest is owned property, even if there are no visible fences.
Laws everywhere are pretty much saying your take is wrong. There is no such thing as an implicit contract, and your take on it is plain victim blaming.
It is very surprising to read this on a board where many people write code: if a dev found unlicensed code, they would certainly not think it is public domain.
It's a devil's bargain. If you opt-out of snippets, it simply means somebody else claims the top spot, and you are left with even less traffic (by a significant amount)
> I disagree. There is an implicit contract between website publishers and search engines that it’s ok to do this. The website can set nosnippet in robots if they want to not have the snippet in search results.
Who made this contract? I never signed one. If I came to your place of business and copied your content and provided it somewhere else, I would be infringing your copyright. Do I have to put up signs specifying that at my place of business? Why is this any different? My web content is not the property of someone else and by publishing my information that is in no way an implicit grant of the right to reproduce it.
I wonder how true that assumption really is any more. The quality of traffic Google drives to sites I operate is very low compared to all other major sources, with much less engagement by any metric you like, notably including conversions. The only reliable exception is when we're running marketing campaigns in other places, which often result in spikes in both direct visitors landing on our homepage and search engine visitors arriving at our general landing pages.
There is this conventional wisdom that SEO, and in particular playing by Google's rules to rank highly in its results pages, is the only way you can run a viable commercial site these days. Our experience has been exactly the opposite: our SEO is actually quite effective, in that we do rank very highly for many relevant search terms, but it makes a relatively small contribution to anything that matters. And really, when I write "SEO" here, I'm only talking about general good practices like being fast, having a good information architecture and working well on different devices. We don't change the structure of our pages just because Google's latest blog post says X or Y is now considered a "best practice" or anything like that.
Of course I have no way to know how representative our experience is. YMMV.
Yes you can. There are other ways to market yourself and your website. For instance, the author of “Fearless Negotiation” has appeared in four or five podcasts I follow. The well known pundits in the Apple ecosystem grew an audience organically through word of mouth.
Hoping to stand out on Google results as a business plan is recipe for failure. You are one algorithm change from going out of business.
That doesn't seem right.