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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
