Google's efforts to thwart Internet copycats known as "scrapers" have backfired.
What started out with the best intentions has become Friday's Internet joke du jour after Google was caught using its own scraper to mine content.
It all began when Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, tweeted out the link to a new form for people to fill out if they find their website has been duplicated by a scrapper.
If you see a scraper URL outranking the original source of content in Google, please tell us about it: http://t.co/WohXQmI45X
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 27, 2014
Dan Barker, a web marketer, then pointed out a prime example.
.@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
The tweet highlights Google's own scraping, which took the definition of the nefarious activity from Wikipedia ("a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping"), then put it above the Wikipedia link.
Barker's bit of snark has already accrued more than 14,000 retweets.
The screenshot from Barker highlights Google's semantic search, which attempts to anticipate what a search query is asking and provide an answer.
Google's efforts to thwart scraping while engaging in its own form of content farming highlights the tension between the company's goal of providing quick answers and its role as a portal to the rest of the Internet.
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Google has an interest in providing the best search results possible, however Wikipedia misses out on a click if Google can just put its verbatim answer at the top. Yes, Google includes the Wikipedia link, but the fact that the search algorithm put Wikipedia first just under its semantic box highlights the sometimes hypocritical world of search.
Google clearly recognizes the problem that scraping poses and the value of appearing higher in search results. But if Google is just going to do its own scraping, front-page ranks could end up being valued like second-page ranks. Truth is, XKCD put it best. We all hate feeling so desperate as to find ourselves on the second page of Google's search results. Maybe Google simply does too.

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