You have the causality wrong. Rap Genius has Andreessen Horowitz because Rap Genius is special.
In this case, the user experience for a Google user is worse when Rap Genius is removed. Google has some incentive to be more active in fixing the problem there, especially since Rap Genius was cooperative, technically competent, and aside from their "rapper swag persona", genuinely nice guys.
Can someone clarify for me, again, what is so special about Rap Genius? It's just a bunch of stupid rap lyrics. So what? In fact, how are they not being sued for copyright by the owners of all the lyrics they're posting, anyway?
I run across Rap Genius now and then and have always considered it to be spam, just like yahoo answers, ehow, and mahalo pages.
Sorry to say, but your assessment of the site is 100% incorrect. It STARTED as a Rap Lyrics website, but it quickly expanded to be an ANY lyrics website (and they will probably expand beyond that)
The main driving force behind it is that anyone can edit the lyrics, and even better, anyone can ANNOTATE the lyrics to explain what certain sections mean.
I looked up this song one day trying to understand more of the allusions made in the song; I know the title itself alludes to Plato's 'The Cave' and wanted to delve deeper. Because of this site, I can see that Verse 3:
> So come out of your cave walking on your hands
> And see the world hanging upside down
> You can understand dependence
> When you know the maker's hand
is an allusion to St. Francis.
Most of the time when Rap Genius ISN'T the top result for lyrics when I google, I facepalm and go directly to their site.
I should emphasize here that this overly positive post isn't intended to condone their shady, spammy blackhat SEO tactics, but damnit if they aren't the BEST lyrics site by a fair margin.
> even better, anyone can ANNOTATE the lyrics to explain what certain sections mean.
Maybe I looked at the wrong lyrics, but I saw precious few explanations, instead most lines had jokes and/or totally unrelated pictures attached to them. Often enough the jokes is to simply restate what was said in rapper slang in plain english, which is funny for exactly the first time you read it, then it's just spam.
All I know is that they somehow come up in my google results fairly often and usually unrelated to the context of my intended search and it always felt like it was SEO'd junk crapping up my results. I added them to my google filter to keep them from showing up in my searches anymore, along with all the inane commentary from their community discussion underneath each song.
However, if their licensing deals are anything like what other sites have to pay for lyrics, it's going to significantly (entirely?) cut into their profit margin.
I actually avoid using them because the design is hard on the eyes and I find the way they present annotations to be annoying. I don't think there's anything special about them at all, especially when you consider that the idea is completely unoriginal.
But I'm not trying to use any lyrics site. Rap Genius garbage just always popped up on my (to me)-unrelated searches. People can respond to me with how they're not spam or they're not as spammy as other lyrics sites, but the point is that they pop up in the same frequency and same context as every other link-farm/content-mining crap-fest on the internet, like ehow, cha-cha, yahoo answers, mahalo, paidcontent, and so on.
Can someone clarify for me, again, what is so special about Rap Genius?
Why? You've no doubt read 10x reasons people here have said so (in the other threads). Do you just want to argue? If you don't agree, fine, but clearly a large and vocal group does. So what? Move along - find other things to care about.
> Google has some incentive to be more active in fixing the problem there
That's exactly how I feel too. Though the incentive for google is very unclear, the lack of clarity is explored further below.
> You have the causality wrong. Rap Genius has Andreessen Horowitz because Rap Genius is special.
Not saying Rap Genius is not a special lyrics start-up. Not even saying that it would not have been a good candidate for any VC financing them.
Though, Definitely saying that the special case leniency shown by Google sure make it seem like having Andreessen Horowitz is the only thing different between Rap Genius and scores of sites before with this and similar situations.
> In this case, the user experience for a Google user is worse when Rap Genius is removed.
And its not when other good sources are removed because they were link bombed or their content was scraped more than their competitors?
> Rap Genius was cooperative
Find me one person in their situation who would not be. It was to either co-operate or die.
> Rap Genius was technically competent
How?
> Aside from their "rapper swag persona", genuinely nice guys.
I am judging Google.
I have nothing against Rap Genius founders, nor their "rapper swag persona" and I'll believe you when you say the are nice guys.
In this case, the user experience for a Google user is worse when Rap Genius is removed. Google has some incentive to be more active in fixing the problem there, especially since Rap Genius was cooperative, technically competent, and aside from their "rapper swag persona", genuinely nice guys.