[bamboleo]

I don’t see why this is controversial. Video is content. Google has always shown content from other sites and sometimes it’ll embed a whole YouTube player. If anything, it’s good that they feature content from not-YouTube.

The “quality” of TikTok videos is not really important here because one might actually look for them.

[ehsankia]

A more close example is how there's a Tweet carousel that can sometimes show up. I personally find that very useful. This is no different from that.

[stingraycharles]

Isn’t this against the license of those sites, though? I’m pretty sure you’re absolutely not allowed to crawl Instagram content let alone mirror their videos.

[judge2020]

You implicitly give a license to crawlers if you don’t take action to block them via robots.txt or otherwise block them via your server. If you do either of these, google will respect the site’s decision and you probably could take them to court if they tried to evade blockers that block google bot (but since google always respects robots.txt and never craws from a different ASN or different user agent, even for safe browsing crawls, they’re fine).

So if Instagram wants to block google from downloading their videos, they can

  Disallow: /video/

(Or however their url scheme works)

[bamboleo]

I would assume Google isn’t just gonna try to start needless fights with Facebook’s lawyers, so it’s likely legal.