Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the average-person-plus-anonymity-plus-audience dept.

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."

3 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Site rating by metaltoad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Site rating by blogeasy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sounds a lot like social bookmarking or sites like the del.icio.us bookmarking site. I think eventually there will be some integration of this type of "voting" for sites by humans to help improve the search results. Also, some of the search engines are tracking which results people actually click on as well.

      --

      Browse the Information Directory
  2. "Search Engines" or Google? by Quixote · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Let's call a spade a spade here. 42% of Google's revenues come from AdSense, their program of putting ads on third-party websites. This will amount to about $3 Billion this year (projected, based on past growth).

    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.