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A year ago, Google began displaying lyrics in the search results as answers. It was assumed they sourced the lyrics from specific publishers with rights, attribution or payment.
However, there is a group of webmasters claiming at least with the Hello song from Adele that Google is stealing the lyrics from Metrolyrics. Their proof, the comments and additional text in the lyrics Google is showing in their lyrics answer.
Here is a picture:
Yvo Schaap said on his blog that "Not only do these lyrics have random characters and weird sentences mixed into them, these weird errors reveal that Google (badly) scraped the lyrics from Metrolyrics (owned by CBS), only to strip the source, not show any source credits, but even attributed them to their own Google Play product as a promotion."
I am trying to give Google the benefit of the doubt. Maybe both Metrolyrics source and Google's source is the same paid source?
@rustybrick imho can't deny Metrolyrics seems to be the source of Google's lyrics, and there are no credits attributed to them.
— Yvo Schaap (@yvoschaap) December 8, 2015@rustybrick @yvoschaap @aaronwall it's pure scraping from metrolyrics
— Max Ciociola (@maxciociola) December 8, 2015What do you think?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: At around 1pm EST, the Google Play store, which is where Google links to for the full lyrics, removed the lyrics from their site. Google may drop them as well:
Update #2: At around 4pm EST, the lyrics from the Google search results page has been removed.
Update #3: The lyrics are back, they are now correct and listed without comments or typos. Google has still not responded to my questions around this story.
