Sgt_Kickaxe - 10:15 am on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

I think it's unhelpful in the discussion for people to blur the lines between organic SERPs, content ownership and the current form of their knowledge engine, as usually there's a personal agenda or a biased opinion behind it. Sure, we can speculate "what google will do", "what they're trying to do", but until there's an instance of "someone elses content" being used in their knowledge engine, I don't see the correlation between it and 3rd party (copyrighted) content.

I have no personal bias one way or the other so please don't suggest I do. With permission I can/will link to 50+ search terms in which Wikipedia, Amazon, the NYTimes and many other public or non-profit information is scraped verbatim. It's not a "generic information" type of scraping, some of it contains opinion. We don't have to speculate as to wether or not they are scraping content, they are and I can prove it in spades.

As Google transitions out of search and into knowledge on their pages is it really ok for them to be using the very content from pages they will no longer send as much traffic to because of how they are displaying it?

It's also not just Google knowledge, take a look at an actor like Tom Hanks and look at their movie carousel. Look at the movie description, they are verbatim Wikipedia and IMDB for the most part right now. Did Wikipedia ok this without attribution? Did IMDB waive their copyright to their text? Google doesn't say.

Seriously, whatever your opinion of me is(heard it the first time, no need to tell me again)... is what Google has already done ok? Someone has to ask... I want to know more about where the writerless knowledge is coming from and why.

I don't complain that Google takes my snippets since they send me traffic but taking content and moving it onto their pages seems to be a bit of an overstep does it not? I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Edit: I'm well aware that many on WW don't like anti-google type language but please understand that this is a legitimate concern about a specific action of Googles and not a slam against the company. I was also told by a mod, after my post in the SEO forum was deleted, that I was free to post this discussion in THIS forum and so I have. Lets get over it and figure out if Google is going too far, before it's too late.(It would be a non-issue if they used their own content creators but that's apparently not the case).