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Google feeds this service with information from Web sites it considers reliable, but it hasn't established formal relationships with any content provider whose information is being used for this feature, Norvig says. Google doesn't expect that the owners of the Web sites will complain over the possibility that this new service will steal traffic away from them, Norvig says. On the contrary, being featured at the top of Google's results list will give these Web sites great exposure, and will likely result in increased traffic, he says.

also: [google.com...]

Type population of countryname and you'll see a reference to the CIA factbook. (again a poor choice of sources)

Why is it a poor choice?

Curveball.

lmao

[edited by: Dayo_UK at 8:41 pm (utc) on April 8, 2005]

Not the best debut - but lets see how it develops.

Have you thought about my suggestion or given up hope?

Web definitions for Windows: A window is a graphic, usually rectangular in shape, containing either some kind of graphical interface, or a textual representation, of the output of and allowing input for one of a number of simultaneously running computer processes.

Google swallowed the red pill.

Answers seem to be a bit different.

yeah, how do they get away with that? I see a copyright photo that I took on Google Images. They just lifted it from my site! lol

C

[edited by: lawman at 11:53 am (utc) on April 9, 2005]
[edit reason] TOS 26 [/edit]

This is altogether much more eerie!
DerekH

As for some sites that may be losing traffic because the facts from other sites are at the top, that's no different than many other algo and display changes.

My site is regional and I spend a lot of time and money keeping accurate records of all sorts of local data.

twist - I'm sympathetic to this point of view, if the new Facts feature is displacing you for queries on which you would otherwise rank. I'm curious about whether this actually happens. On the searches I ran, I didn't see anything like this. The Facts sites returned weren't in the top 10 or whatever for the queries that brought them up. Probably, there will be some overlap, but I didn't see it, even on searches with "facts" in the query.

I understand that this is all speculation and can be dismissed as nothing more than that, but if you think about it, what is stopping them from pulling more and more information from peoples website without their permission?

For instance, what if in the future when someone types "town name" into the search, it pulls all the data from my site like; address, directions, local websites, parks, shopping, schools, areas of interest, brief history, zipcode and whatever else. What reason is left for people to come to my site?

Just like the example I've given of how you can get information out of Google snippets without ever visiting the web page of the site the snippet is from (for example, if you want a local restaurant's phone number, just type in the name and the area code and the number is almost guaranteed to be in the snippets -- no reason to visit the site it's on).

I'm a Google fan, but this feature stinks.

Onya
Woz

cEM