Google making another move against affiliates w/ Best Things for Everything Guide

[aberdons]

Souce: https://blog.google/products/shopping/bestthings/

"When you shop for products — whether for your home, your family or yourself — you should feel confident knowing you’re making a good decision and buying the best product for your needs. Search interest for products like the "best exercise bikes," "best ring lights" and "best air fryers" increased by 100% or more in the last year, signaling that these days, people are increasingly using the Internet to research and discover products to buy.

Today we’re making it easier for you to discover top products with the Best Things for Everything Guide, a microsite that highlights 1,000 products based on what’s popular on the web, so you can easily find great choices."

Yet another shitty move. Seems they're not content with stealing content for no-click searches, going after product reviews now as well.

 

[bernard]

Those anti-trust cases can't come soon enough.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Right now that's not really a threat, but we all know soon that's going to be in the featured snippets, if not a majority of the time (or if they're dumb enough, exclusively), they'll scrape and use our content in the snippets and there will be some outbound link to that site in a bait and switch. Wouldn't be the first time they've pulled that stunt.

None of this would matter if their entire model wasn't scraping everyone else's content while telling us not to scrape them.

Even then, that's a hugely beneficial relationship to be in with them. It's all the carousels and snippets where they undermine entire industries (like the lyrics sites) that's the problem.

The clear difference between friendly "do no evil" Google and "we got rid of that slogan" Google is when they decided being a search engine wasn't enough and they wanted to become an answer engine. And they're literally stealing those answers and not sending traffic on over 50% of searches now. Smart, and more power to em, but I'd also enjoy some massive schadenfreude if they can't donate their way out of it with dirty politicians ultimately.

 

[bernard]

This is not going to fly in the EU for sure.

Newsmedia is increasingly moving into the affiliate space and there is already a war going on with them wanting payment for "links".