Matt Cutts didn’t expect this response via Twitter (Scraper URL)
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, recently tweeted a link to a form that allows website owners to report websites that have scraped content from other sites and that rank higher than those of the original source.
Cutts is referring to website owners that scrape content from other websites and post that content on their own websites. This sort of means that Google might not be able to tell, in some cases, what site is the original source.
Probably not what Cutts expected
.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f
— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014
To put it simply, someone has spotted that Google does exactly what a scraper does. It scrapes content from sites like Wikipedia, and uses it for its semantic search functions by providing the information in the SERPs, which means everyone should report Google for exactly what it is telling others to report.
Whilst Google only extracts an excerpt of information from articles via Wikipedia, the irony is actually quite amusing.
March 3, 2014
Its only funny till the long term potential for abuse is fully realized:
http://googlein10years.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/googlepedia/