Has Google Search become a giant copyright avoidance scheme?

No longer showing Ads on pages with Google auto-generated content.

[glitterball]

Over the past few weeks I have noticed new levels of Google's "own" content dominating the search results for the main keyword topics related to the websites that I run.

Desktop
For the main keywords, on desktop, there is a panel on the right-hand side, consisting of Google content: Google Hotels, Google Maps, Google Reviews, Google Destination Guide and related searches. In the main list of websites on the left, there is again only one website result visible above the fold, with the rest of the space taken up by a Google-generated "Things To Do in" panel with thumbnails and links to Google's Destination Guide.

For other related searches, there is often only one or two traditional website links visible, with the rest of the space taken up by panels such as "Destinations", with 12 thumbnails and some (possibly) auto-generated titles and text.

Mobile
On mobile, things aren't quite the same: for the main "destination name" search, all content above the fold (and beyond) is Google-generated, however for related keyword searches, there is no Google generated content as yet.

No Ads
Another thing that is new, is that these results pages no longer show any ads!
These are very high profile keywords that would have many many advertisers bidding, indeed I have complained in the past that all of the content above the fold was ads! Yet Google have now decided to stop showing ads on these pages completely. In other areas where Google has been close to the line regarding copyright (e.g. Google Image Search or Google News), they have also chosen not to show ads, so I can't help suspecting that this is related - or, perhaps, it is to keep the user on Google search to drill down to at least one related sub-topic.

A few months ago, Google also increased the length of the text descriptions in the search results: presumably their lawyers have decided that this is still fair use? Undoubtedly these longer descriptions will provide a searcher with the answer that that they were looking for in many cases, and save them from clicking through to the source website.

It seems to me, that everything about Google Search in 2018, is designed to push the limits of fair use, and discourage the searcher from clicking through to another website.

So, has Google Search in 2018 become little more than a giant scheme to avoid copyright and create new AI-generated boundaries of what constitutes fair use?

[MrSavage]

Um, image search can now be found with "shopping ads" which pay Google as well. Not Google's images, but the image search results pages are with a shopping ad (sure not all the time, but it's coming more frequently), big long banner, show just below the search box and above the results (#shocked). Are you excluding shopping ads from this observation? I've concluded if there is a hint at monetization in any given search, Google will have something there to skim off it. So maybe what you're finding are areas (searches) that Google has yet to get to or these really are completely non profitable searches. They would know, that's for sure.

To your last point, as they will claim, it's what the users want. The users don't want to go out there or click links. It's about serving it up because hey, people want that! Just like they wanted all access to images which has since been squashed. People liked file sharing too, but those were shut down. People liked Torrents as well, but the industries had something to say about that too. It's not about what the people want, unless of course it scores brownie points. The legal stuff? That comes after serving the people what they want. Think how people cried when they couldn't get the easy access to the images. Imaging as well if YouTube had to stop uploads of copyrighted materials BEFORE rather than after it goes up. It's all for the people. People want easy and hey, who really cares about the content creators anyways. Certainly not the non content creators that's for certain.