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Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'?
Carl Bialik writes to tell us the Wall Street Journal has an interesting look at how search engines and original content are affecting the quality of the web. From the article: "If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance. Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines."
'Nuff said.
-A-ffecting not -E-ffecting.
Grrrrr..
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
It's AFFECTING! Worthless content indeed!
Limina.Log
Yes, I'm effraid the web has been effected enough already.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
It's because you want to cheat the system and get ranked highly to begin with.
If you were truly "popular", you wouldn't have to worry about worthless original content.
Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do.
The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".
Now, if I just made up a company name right now....let's see....Framboozleweisenschnapps.
Nope, no hits. I want that company to program open source software.
Of course if someone goes searching for open source software no one is going to find your company. However if you get out there and do the work, when you do online articles, post your company's name, and the work you do is evident in the online content, with time, you WILL bubble to the top.
That's the problem. An entire world full of people, people competing in similar businesses, all wanting to be in the first 10 hits of a google search.
Quit crying. Quit trying to cheat the system and LIVE.
"Faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine."
Have faith in the system, do your work, do it honestly.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
How can we avoid this? I think that human rating of sites either by administrators or general users could vastly improve the situation. Imagine being able to rate a site based on how well it matched your search.
So someone provides some original content to make money? whats the big deal... why is it looked down upon if someone simply is trying to get ad revenue and it is all altruistic if they do it for nothing.....does the content somehow differ. no it doesnt.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
I recall the situation where your page references another page which referenced another page which referenced another page... which referenced your page in the first place. So where's the original content?
by making sure the original content gets listed first, the pages listed are less garbage and more content. Otherwise, the web runs the risk of becoming a collection of copied content where the original is lost.
The worthless original content in my Journal is all my own thank you very much.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Now, everybody get on to wikipedia, and vandalize the Schroedinger's_cat article as much as you can!
Yes it is true. I used to work for a company that made thousands of fake websites with bogus random content in it. I was the one writing the content and I just made up whatever as long as it had these certain keywords every paragraph. It does effect users browsing too. petsuppliesplus contracted us for 2000 websites. My boss quickly bought a bunch of stock in them after he landed the contract then as soon as we put all the bogus websites online the stock went straight up.
Hold on. So people go out and intentionally deceive their intended audience in order to get their page rankings higher to get more hits and presumably more cash from ads... and it's the search engines' fault?
Right. The search engines are responsible for the crap out there, not good ol' capitalistic greed. Nope.
Word to the wise: If the search engines exist (and why wouldn't they?) then they'll employ a system. If capitalistic bastards exist they'll try to take advantage of it.
Doesn't the Google Page Rank display on their toolbar help with this problem?
Unless you have some way of ranking a page, this may continue to be a problem.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sure search engines help people find your content, but they aren't the only or even key reason why this is on the rise. Search engines have been around since roughly the beginning of the web's popular usage. What's new these days is how easy it is to do two things: publish and advertise.
:)), as well as others now trying to immitate them (some came first, but everyone looks second to the public, so...), is now just a matter of pasting a few lines of HTML into your blog template. Adsense brokers the deals with advertisers and you get a cut.
Publishing via blogs is ridiculously simple, and it's so interlinked that it naturally plays into the latest search enging ranking methods.
Advertising, thanks to Google Adsense (not due to Google search
These two things are clearly what facilitated the gold rush of the past few years for advertising dollars online. In turn, this affects content quality because right now we're in a race for quantity and the two aren't often found together. Once the dust settles, the quality will improve again and most of the gold diggers will go home.
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Already now in germany I cannot search for a local electronics store, because if I enter the name of my town and say 'pc peripherals' in google, I'll end up with the 100s of pages filled with these crappy harvest-sites, containing all often used search terms and all geographical names, but linking to nothing useful. I've given up now, hoping that google will somehow manage this (they already tried something similar in the case of BMW). In the meantime I'll have to search the phonebook to find stores, or ask on internet-fora on computing (good luck finding those, though!).
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Do they still have advertising on the Internets ? , even Symantec block them in their products thesedays
thats what happens when you ram them down peoples throats, gone are the days of doing the web for fun , everybody is so motivated by greed that the best they can come up with for a billion connected computers is advertising, sad really
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Yes, this creation of worthless content for money is disgusting. People should be more like me - I blog, and create worthless content for free.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Search engines analyses the Web content by keywords. But it is not what people realy need. We need sense, SE give us keywords...
Hide your files and folders from others!
If they're providing the content simply to get highly placed, it's likely that the content is eroneous. I can randomly generate a lot more content (even content that somewhat makes sense) which is wrong than I can write content which is correct.
All of this blather about getting your site ranked by the search engines, adviews, and people setting up sites just to get ad revenue so companies can sell products to people who don't really want them is a sickness.
Companies are so interested in this week's figures that they forget to make good stuff that people want. It's way easier to listen to some parasuit telling you in 50 buzzwords or less that he can make you lots of money right now.
And it's easier to plagiarize, change the wording here and there, and get your page ranked high than it is to come up with something new. And people don't seem to want quality any more anyway, they want cheap, fast, and easy.
I think I'll drink that hemlock now.
sigs, as if you care.
Google is making it easy and profitable for people to engage in such behavior. The payments to AdSense participants are done via legal means (checks); hence Google has the ability to track down the offenders and sue them; and yet there has not been a single such case filed by Google for AdSense abuse. Google is profiting handsomely from this fraud, but it is very shortsighted of them.
I know I'm going to get modded down by the Google fanboys in this crowd, but please put down the koolaid and think about it.
You'd better copyright "Framboozleweisenschnapps" before SCO does.
"Put your message in a modem, and throw it into the cyber-sea." - Rush
I'm sorry but worth is subjective. I have no use for my broken vcr, but my friend's family is in scrap metals and to them it's revenue in waiting.
Another friend digs up these so called "worthless" dregs of the internet and makes cool remixes out of them.
So yeah, if youre some mccarthy-minded 1950's conformist who's grown too old to see potential in new ideas, it's crap, but there are those of us who find uses for the supposed "drivel" which litters the web.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Quite right: Google has a very good understanding of what search terms should link to George W. Bush.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
If you want a high ranking for "charts and graphs with Ruby On Rails", why not just blog about it? Is it really that hard to write something?
The Army reading list
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Who have never made money by publishing stories because the topic is popular?
What 'fraud' has been committed, and why can Google sue?
If you mean that websites are breaking copyright laws, that's not Google's problem, until the original copyright owner notifies them.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I'm sorry for doing this, but the word you're looking for is 'affecting', not 'effecting'.
'Affect' is a verb, as in "search engines affect the quality of information on the web".
'Effect' is a noun, as in cause-and-effect: "the effect that search engines have on the quality of information on the web is ...".
Actually, I'm not sorry. They're two different words with two different meanings. What I meant is that I don't mean you any personal insult.
... to recommend that you post anonymously the next time you conspire with someone to hide their illegal activities!
Okay, I don't know what the "official" term is, but apparently there's a cottage industry of helping people bury search terms which are unfavorable to them and their interests.
Case in point: Like many of their members, I was having some billing problems with 24 Hour Fitness - they had misrepresented their offer and were essentially double-billing me. I happened to Google for "24 hour fitness ripoff", but most of the first five pages or so were completely bogus - nearly all of them were subdomains of "6g416h.info". Could 24 Hour Fitness have paid someone to set up a throwaway domain with hundreds of subdomains to squelch any less-than-flattering Google searches? And is there a name for this practice? And why hasn't Google punished them yet?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
"Slashdot Breeds Worthless 'Original Content'?"
The overwhelming amount of information being recirculated, only serves to reinforce the law of diminishing marginal utility.
This means that only those top ranked sites will be of any value.
The quality of the Web is not affected by adding poor content. The reason is the Web is not really a single thing in the way that a novel is. You do not consume the Web as a whole like reading a book but rather pick out the content which is of interest to you. The quality of Web you get is determine by you as the Web as a whole has everything from the absolute worthless to pure gold.
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
The reality is that the vast majority of the "original content" in the average newspaper has (for decades) been created in nearly the same way. The majority of what they publish is no more than mildly edited versions of stories coming from outside sources. Most "business news" is no more than very mildly edited versions of press releases -- in fact, press releases often come with prewritten stories for the papers (and magazines, etc.) to publish. They'll often even have two or three stories to cover the "event" from a business angle, a human angle, etc. They'll make sure they throw in versions of a couple of different lengths as well, so it's trivial for the newspaper to carry it no matter how much or little space they need to fill.
So what's really new here? About all I can think of is the fact that the web makes a lot of it much more transparent. It's much easier for most people to look at a dozen web sites and see they're all carrying essentially identical stories than for somebody reading a newspaper in Minnesota to see that people reading different newspapers in Alabama, California, and London are all reading essentially identical stories, each with a different "reporter's" name in the by-line.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
I thought a large portion of google's ranking was based on how many other pages linked to your web page. If this is the case, then just having "original" content and a few key words really should not make that big of a difference in page rankings. Perhaps this article itself was just copied from somewhere and is not accurate?
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What I know of the "Online Marketing" scene comes from my wife who involves herself in it.
There are many other scenarios besides "search engine optimization" but, they all result in more of the same thing. Someone will find a way to automate the process and the noise floor of automated sites sending content/links/traffic/invitations to act now/etc. to each other without human eyes ever seeing it will rise.
There's a cool sci-fi story in there somewhere...
Hollywood has been doing this for YEARS!
Has this guy ever heard of tabloid journalism? Paparazzi? How about the National Enquirer? Maybe People Magazine? Their are plenty of rags in this country and around the world that regularly print content that is at BEST unsubstantiated gossip, sometimes outright made up stories. Why do they print this? To make money and sell advertisments for x-ray glasses and boob creme.
Even TV has it's 'news magazines' that contain questionable content. Ever watch "A Current Affair"? Making up bogus content to sell advertising is hardly new and hardly unique to the Internet. Based on the content of this article I would say the title could be changed to "Wall Street Journal Breeds Worthless 'Original Content'"?
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With all the focus on ad revenue and search rankings, search engines have forgotten their original purpose - to catalog the Internet and make it possible to find information.
Obscure information from individual sites is no longer indexed at all. Only commercial sites that are actively "promoted" are included in Googles index, for example. I have some obscure technical information on a personal site (sorry no URL, I'm an "Anonymous Coward"), which cannot be found in any search engine. It used to be findable by Google, but not anymore.
There is a business opportunity for a new search engine that indexes everything. Of course, there is still the problem of eliminating the junk sites.
I believe you meant to say Heisenburg's page.
Since when did operating systems become a religion?
Is there a search engine that searches known legitimate sites only?
Now, Wikipedia doesn't make money, and it's far from worthless, but to a large extent it is the perfect example of the kind of reprocessed content Lee Gomes is describing. Being edited by dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia can "afford" to do this on a large scale.
Wikipedia articles tend to rank quite high in search results... and, being GFDL'ed, Wikipedia's articles are copied by dozens of other mirror sites.
The scary result of all this is that I want to check a fact or find independent confirmation of an item in a Wikipedia article, if the item has been there for more than a few months, I frequently find that when I do plausible searches on it, most or even all of the hits are the Wikipedia article itself and its mirrors. It is sometimes quite hard to find any independent sources for the information.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It's just understood that any system that can be exploited for profit will be exploited for profit. So what can be done about this? I don't know if a human screening process will be effective or efficient since anybody can start up this sort of fake information site quickly and easily. Clearly people have found ways to trick Page Rank. Now I don't know too much about Page Rank, but how about having another variable involved to reward the age of a site (without it changing hands)? That screen could eliminate upstarts out for a quick buck. For example, some of the opinions and stories posted on Slashdot have been downright garbage (*ducks*), but since it's established for a long time, it carries a pretty good reputation and that's a good verification for authority of content validity right? I know it's not the best example for ORIGINAL content, but you get the idea.
Often I search for something in Google, and the top 5 results INCLUDING the sponsored link are all websites that simply take your keywords and generate a list of links to other websites or perform their own searches. I mean, how on earth can Google give top ranking to websites that generate content on the fly?
Google was very quick to make an example out of BMW for artificially inflating their page ranking, but, I mean, BMW is an original content provider. I don't understand how Google can allow these spam crap sites to get top ranking using OBVIOUSLY deceptive practices.
Google's whole page ranking system is flawed. It penalizes legitimate content providers if they do anything to increase their page ranking, but allow spam sites and portals to get top ranking. I can see why BMW would want their website ranked higher then the spam sites that are often listed in the top 5 almost by default now.
And to even allow these spam sites to be sponsored links? Honestly, Google needs to learn how to turn down a buck by only taking money from legitimate content providers, they need to be a little more selective about their clientele.
As much as everybody hypes about Google and their "miraculous" services, advertising, and page ranking technology, these same virtues will end up being Google's vices, especially if some other search engine starts weeding through the crap and only showing the websites with true content.
What Google needs to do is beside every link listed, for registered users, offer a REAL rating system which allows users to suggest that the site is excellent, on topic, spam, broken, or simply crap. Google needs to start adding some humanity to their ranking system, their bots are failing to identify between premium content and the garbage that is flooding the net.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
SEO is copy that is written to do nothing but passibly weave some keywords into a passage ostensibly about some subject.
Search on elance for copy writers. It's nothing but offers for people to write 20 500 word 'articles' about a subject for 100 bucks.
I don't remember if they supply you with the keywords to include in your copy or not. That might be what makes a good SEO writer v. a bad SEO writer.
SEO means 'Search Engine Optimized' which means 'Generic pablum that has all the important keywords a few times in it.'
Wax on, wax off baby!
I see one danger in this hunt for "original content". Given the need that you have to have original AND if at all possible alarming content, people will start fabricating stories out of the blue, even more than they do already.
Research costs time, and time's a scarce commodity in a medium that thrives on speed. The FIRST to have the story in will have his side read. Not the one who got all his facts right.
So what we'll get to see are poorly, if at all, researched stories that will maybe, or not, get a revocation later. And I bet my rear that that revoc will not be high on the search engine index lists. I kinda doubt they'll META it with any relevant and a few irrelevant tags to get high level hits. Not to mention that few will link to it.
What I can forsee is that "truth" becomes what has the most support. Not what is really true.
Yes, even more than currently.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That could alter the experiment...
So what's the problem?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
People will set up a site that just aggregates RSS feeds based on a few keywords, use those keywords as tags, then ping Technorati. This clutters up search results until someone at Technorati notices the site is junk, or someone reports it to Technorati as junk.
The odd thing is, the keywords they choose aren't always what you'd expect to be popular spam terms. I've found some of my own posts showing up in scraped sites about things as mundane as coffee.
...to recommend that you post anonymously when dispensensing legal advice.
Oh. You actually did do that. Hrmm. Carry on.
So what's the problem?
The problem is that on Slashdot, if you're a marketer, you're evil until proven otherwise.
Of course, once you start up your own company and are competing against the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., you realize that those competitors have tons of content on their sites, and thousands of inbound links, and all you have is a great product. So if you're smart, you'll start developing new content of your own that showcases your product, goes into detail about why the underlying technology is so good, describes how customers have used your product successfully, and so on.
There's nothing wrong in that, and it's not gaming the system. Ignoring the fact that search engines work the way they do would be an incredibly stupid move, particularly since it works to the advantage of your larger, better-funded incumbent competitors.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It used to be if you had these things called 'dollars', you got more attention. Dollars let rent other people's time. You could rent it directly, by subsidizing their entertainment (TV ads) or indirectly, by hiring people to go out and get attention drawn to you (marketing).
Now, you can just spend time if you don't have dollars, and get more attention.
Or, you can spend the time getting dollars, to pay other people to get more attention.
So in some ways, search just removed the middleman. The issue is whether it's better to have attention because you're good at earning dollars, or because you had time to burn.
A.
Why don't search engines just PAY USERS to edit/rank/moderate search listings, ie. reducing search entropy increases user's PayPal, E-gold, etc. slashdot karma points, whatever? Or that of the Wikipedia of their choice?
--rgb
Dead on mate.
I recently joined Elance, and I see a lot of RFQs for "30 Short Articles on Pet Care" which, of course, are accompanied by bids for 50 bucks by the usual army of "service providers". Often, the RFQs stipulate "articles are on same general topic, but writing style must vary slightly for each article".
Nice eh?
web is shit
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The Heisenberg Effect is a good geeky example, but the correct/ relevant the social sciences equivalent is the Hawthorne Effect.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
There will always be ways around the search engine "AI" - I stumbled across a method that works quite well without the need to create multiple sites... And rating a page cannot determine its validity because "what" they are rating is not determined (look, authenticity, colors, appeal, etc)
The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.
Not by ask.com. There was an article on New Scientist yesterday about how they were getting rid of Jeeves, and claimed their engine was as good as Google.
I tested it with the string "how to quit smoking mcgrew" to see if it could find that article I wrote for K5 a few years ago.
I got at least a dozen pages plagairizing the work; the f'morons even left my name in. These were all commercial, ad-ridden sites.
I'm getting a lawyer.
(non-MRC="bushel")
I noticed Yahoo is not sending you directly to your search results. For example, if I do a Yahoo search on "open source event calendar", mouse-over the search results. The first result is my site http://www.k5n.us/, but that's not that URL. Instead it is:
A ;_ylu=X3oDMTE2aWs4bWthBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRz ZWMDc3IEdnRpZANGNjU0Xzc1/SIG=11fp6kdli/EXP=1141324 087/**http%3A//www.k5n.us/index.php
http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0LaRWK35wVER6YAdQ1XNyo
So, I'm wondering.... Is Yahoo tracking which sites get selected for a given search term???
And, if so, is this a good thing? It would seem like a good thing since should improve the accuracy of the search results...
http://www.k5n.us
Google needs to do a better job of weeding out the ilk but I don't see a technical way that they can do that. Does anyone? How would you code to recognize the difference between an original source and a rehash of the exact same material (with different wording)?
.com also own the .net, .us, .info, etc? Are the domains registered for more than the next 6 months? There are all sorts of more meta-ish indicators of the overall credibility of a site, and that can be (and I'm certain is) used by people like Google to weight searc results.
Hmm. How about tracking the apparent age of any webs of links that point to that content? Or, for a more generalized credibility checkup, look at the domain registration. Does the
But I can tell you that sitting down and writing coherent, grammatically correct, well-punctuated content on a structurally clean web site to which a fair number of non-related (no common ownership, no obvious link farming, etc) other sites link will - on anything but the most common topics - jump you right up into the top results.
To help stamp out the plagarists, just grab an occasional unique phrase from each of your hotter pages and Google that string. If other results come back, follow the trail and smack the pirates around as needed.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You and the author are full of beans. The author claims that Google encourages wholesale plagiarism, which is nonsense. You are claiming Google has a way of detecting said plagiarism and knowingly profits from it. That's not just nonsense, it's libel.
I'd like to see you prove that Google is doing what you say. Go on, show me.
The author's experiment is interesting first hand expereince, but he needs to learn a few more lessons about web economy. Plagiarism is a problem that's always been around. It's not near as bad as the page rank manipulation schemes that people use to promote bogus content. "Whirlywinds" has probably been doing way more than paying desperate people $0.15/hour to cut and paste content. From this statement,
Colloidal silver is one of those bits of medical quackery that thrive on the unregulated Web.
I think the author has some thinking to do about what a free press is all about. I consider his article poorly researched and I'm happy there are better sources of original content out there on the unregulated net.
Blaming Google for other people's bad behavior is about as good as burning libraries for housing content you don't like. I have faith that Google is aware of the issues involved and will provide a fix soon enough. Google, despite lots of competition and attempted vandalism, is still the best search engine there is.
Oh yeah, you can keep your koolaid for all your other chair throwing friends who hate Google.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It seems to me a bit more intelligent to form your communication based on how the living will receive it, rather than priding yourself on how people might speak when you are long since dead.
Newspaper/Magazine - tabloids
Book - bibliographies
Cell phone - "OMG that guy is so stupid!!1!1!!" right next to you on the bus when you are just trying to sleep.
email - "3n1arg3 ur p3n1s!!"
You should just say humans breed worthless content.
Google 1, search engine spammers 0.
Oh wait, you were using the contraction for it is - which is perfectly valid, even if it doesn't look right. Wonder how many grammer nazis impulsively wanted to correct you for using an apostrophe in its...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
we have all heard of the proposal to make Pi=3.0, right? After all, if enough people decide that it should be so instead of some sequence of irrational digits then we can have it that way, right?
If I recall correctly, BMW got in trouble for generating different content for the GoogleBot versus normal browsers. How is Google supposed to tell what is valid content if someone like BMW does a bait-and-switch on them? In that case, BMW had it coming...
http://www.k5n.us
Ultimately, I believe that there is human intervention in many areas of the Google index. They know that a site like Wikipedia has premium content, and therefore it should not get outsmarted via SEO in many areas. I suspect there is some type of hidden weight ranking on a per-site or per-domain basis that helps offset what these traffic monetizing groups are doing.
The act of observing something changes it ,
This is part of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and it applies to competitive capitalism.
I hope that the followers of John Nash, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_nash , will someday publish an analysis of Google from a perspective of Game theory. (Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns.)
The people who can grok Google will become very wealthy.
They just need to put this crap everywhere so that people can't talking on their cell phones in buildings. Personally, it's annoying to hear people answer phones at work too.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
...and I will judge you as I see fit. You don't have to be proud of your intelligence if you don't want to, but if you refuse to display it then I will assume you do not have it, and act accordingly.
When you speak incorrectly, I will use that information as data for other decisions I make about you, such as whether or not I hire you, or buy from you, or give you a loan, and so on.
Intelligence is what elevates us above animals. The less of it you have, the more sub-human you are.
What you really need to worry about is when companies Google-bomb the index in order to push "bad" info about their products 20-30+ pages down in the listings.
For example, a couple of months ago, my husband's sister called us to complain that her newish Dell has taken to running slowly, with close to 100% CPU utilization at all times. Our immediate response: malware. Our question: what did you install prior to this problem? Her answer: Party Poker.
I pop over to Google and search for "party poker" malware; "party poker" trojan; "party poker" adware; and various other combinations.
FOR TWENTY+ pages of results, every link returned was to a site praising or advertising Party Poker. The shit-page bombing of the Google index was complete. I think that I got to about the 50th page of results before I started to find any information on the malware that party poker installs and it still wasn't that great of information. GoogleGroups finally got me the info that pointed me in the right directions. I'd expect pages like this if I'd just searched on Party Poker. But for them to poison the index in such a way that searches on "Party Poker" in combination with words that people might be using once their system had been infested by that program--malware, trojan, adware--was very disturbing. Given that the GoogleGroups postings I found about it were both old (1 year+) and newish (a couple of months), this program has been a long-term issue. And now, someone who doesn't understand how the Google index can be poisoned isn't going to find information about what installing the program might do/have done to their system.
I don't know if the index is still poisoned in this way--as I said, it was a couple of months ago. But it has really made me look at Google differently, recently.
Well said, very much what I was thinking.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
I think you are confused about active vs passive. Active is when the syntactic and thematic subject are the same: "I brought the laptop to work.", while passive is when the thematic object is the syntactic subject and a form of 'to be' is used, and if the thematic subject appears it is in a 'by' phrase: "The laptop was brought to work (by me)." 'bring' and 'take' are both transitive verbs, so they can passivize, unlike intransitives. (Try making "I ran to the store." passive.)
Not to mention that what prepositional phrases a verb subcategorizes for can vary by dialect.
And I highly doubt that the average vocabularly size has gone down in the past 100 years. I'd go as far as to say it has probably increased. It seems like the size has gone down because people with less education have greater access to creating media than 100 years ago thanks to things like mimeography/xerography and the Internet, so you see a lot more writing that hasn't been filtered through a copy editor.
You sir, are incorrect. Situational irony does exist. It occurs when a given situation turns out to be different from what we expected. Maybe you would've seen that if you had read the rest of the Wikipedia entry.
Too many slashdotters are too quick to spread misinformation about subjects of which they know little.
Report the site to the advertising company! Tell them what you told us. Maybe the advert companies don't care...but I'm willing to be they do.
Blar.
Woa to us all.
/. editor CORRECTING story post copy!
A niggling language usage post like mine has ACTUALLY resulted in a
I'd go outside to celebrate, but I'm afraid that I'll be knee deep in cats mating with dogs.
Be afraid.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Report spam sites to Google and they'll (eventually) ban them.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
On RentACoder, there are a ton of jobs looking for people to write "100 short articles about auto repair" and junk like that. All of that garbage is going to drive search engine rankings.
Advice: on VPS providers
This story comes down to the fact that people are generally lazy, so given a choice, they'll try to accomplish their goal as easily as possible. What an amazing revelation!
What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.
You miss the point. He's being an exemplar of the point he is trying to make. How brilliant!
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
If a subject is big enough like "holidays", the chances of your worthless content getting to the top of google's pile is unlikely. There's too much good writing on the subject.
However, people will often settle for less good content over none. If you put in certain quite narrow keywords, you'll get a page of mine to do with restaurants in my town up. It's not fantastically written, but it's up at the top because there's not much that gives a better result for those keywords.
Ah, the degeneration of our language, by supposedly educated people...
if ninety-nine percent of everything is, truly, crud ... the yes, I can see the Web being full of worthless content, original or otherwise.
Of course, five minutes with a search engine will tell you that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
and who said that "traditional media" has worthy content?
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
Searching for "party poker" malware; "party poker" trojan; "party poker" adware (to quote your comment) returns lots of good links on the first page, with no "site praising or advertising Party Poker". The only advert that I get is one for "Trojan Adware".
Because the Web has so many articles, it is easy to imagine that they represent nearly everything that has been written on a subject. However, the first 30 search results often merely repeat, sometimes erroneously, the same thing. Wikipedia is only one example. Try searching for the lyrics of a popular song. If someone has made a mistake, it is replicated so much that you start singing it that way in your shower. On almost any given subject, especially in the humanities or social sciences, the difference between what is available on the Internet and what is available in a library is astounding. A "Google Books" search provides some insight into this problem, which is caused by the proprietary nature of much "content," keeping it off the Web.