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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."
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.
Now, everybody get on to wikipedia, and vandalize the Schroedinger's_cat article as much as you can!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
I would guess that most people here don't use IE and thus don't have a need for Google's Toolbar and as such don't see what ranking the page has.
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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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.
As for the subject at hand: I refuse to make excuses for people too lazy to speak or write correctly. Two words have been established, 'affect' and 'effect' and they have different meanings. Using one word in place of the other is either ignorance or apathy. And you know the difference between ignorance and apathy right?
"I don't know, and I don't care".
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
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.
Google 1, search engine spammers 0.
People breed worthless content. I say kill everyone, preferably at birth. That should improve the signal to noise ratio considerably :D