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How Google Trends & News Pollute the Web

Posted by kdawson on from the cesspools-begin-at-home dept.

Danny Sullivan's hard-hitting piece at Search Engine Land calls on Google to quit being evil in one particular way: collaborating with sleazy websites that jump on Google Trends to grab advertising revenue, as Google itself rakes it in. "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has quite famously been on record many times talking about how the Web is full of garbage. It's a cesspool out there, he's said. Today, a short fast look at how his own company pollutes the Web. ... That [example of an off-topic, trend-following] page isn't adding any value to the web. If it didn't exist, we wouldn't be the less savvy... But thanks to Google Trends, we've got a big red flag up in front of publishers that wish to pollute Google's results with this type of garbage. ... On the one hand, I love Google Trends. It's fun seeing what the top terms are that are sparking interest... On the other hand, it's clear how much [garbage] Google has caused to be generated, simply by publishing the trends. But that garbage wouldn't happen, if it didn't know it was going to be rewarded. It is, both with traffic from Google and from revenue from Google for those carrying its ads."

10 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Who cares? by RMH101 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Certainly not Google. Or me, for that matter. The Big G's business model is built on the premise that storage is cheap, and that value is provided by being able to never delete anything, but make it available through a powerful search engine. When did you last delete something out of Gmail, for example?
    There are whole industries around SEO and it seems naive to think that people aren't going to create/alter content in order to get a higher ranking. Does it matter?

    1. Re:Who cares? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ... it seems naive to think that people aren't going to create/alter content in order to get a higher ranking.

      Well, it certainly is naive to think that considering that Google encourages it and they offer a PDF Starter Guide that instructs you how to alter your title, description and meta tags in your website to better your chances of coming up in the "organic" (not adwords) section of search results.

      Does it matter?

      Well, that's the article's argument. That it does matter because Google complains of the internet being a cesspool and yet here they are encouraging it with Trends. To you and I this is no problem. We don't care. To someone like Google that 0.1% of the end user experience might be worth millions of dollars to take care of because those end users are the eyeballs that sells their ad service to marketers of other companies. If Google perceives this to threaten the people that search their site then, yes, it does matter.

      There might be some day when you sit down to use Google and you search for some popular music or terms and all you get is complete unadulterated feces on the first page of search results. And you might consider checking the other search engine pages for the same results. If this phenomena could cause that to happen then, yes, Google will care very much.

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      My work here is dung.
    2. Re:Who cares? by nschubach · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I delete things out of my Gmail all the time... I only keep that which is unresolved. Jokes and other things are read once, and delete. Tracking numbers and receipts for purchases are deleted when I get the item and it's in working condition. If it's expensive, I'll print off a copy of the receipt and file it.

      I use the inbox as a "TODO" list and deleting something from my inbox is a good feeling.

      On top of that, I occasionally go into the deleted items and remove them all from there as well.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  2. Tell me about it. by Skraut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I started using using google blog search to create an RSS feed of topics I'm interested. Gradually I started using regex to filter out sites that were clearly just spam sites. Now my regex statement is about 20K in size, and out of 150 results that Google returns, I may have 4 or 5 stories that make it through the filter.

    --
    Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
  3. Re:hard hitting? by somersault · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I don't think he even understands how the ads work. He's viewing pages which mention chocolate, so the ads end up being about chocolate. Yet he somehow thinks that this is because of Google Trends? If he reloaded the page he'd get slightly different ads, yet he seems to talk like each page only has one set of static ads o_0

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    which is totally what she said
  4. Re:hard hitting? by somersault · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Also should mention that I thought TFS was talking about those stupid ads you get on Google's search results that have clearly just been generated specifically tailored to your search. I thought that they were generated on the fly though, rather than from Trends.

    That doesn't seem to be what the guy is beefing about.

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    which is totally what she said
  5. The problem with crowd widdom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem with naive crowd wisdom, like the one generated by Google Trends,
    is that it's generally untrue that most people like what people like most.
    The average "like" of people is not the "like" of the average person.
    What people like most is the lowest common denominator.

    Ironically, when publishers adopt that fallacy, they create the garbage that gives Google relative value, by reducing even more value from other ways of data consumption.
    So the negative effect of Google Trends works great for Google.

  6. Re:Chocomize! by Rhaban · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They could detect articles that are duplicates of previous articles and penalize that.

  7. Re:hard hitting? by KarrdeSW · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So it's most likely Google Trends.

    It should also be noted that the guy's only "case study" has to do with an article poached from CNN. While Google Trends makes a likely culprit, this misbehavior could just as easily have started by people watching the "top articles" on CNN.

    It's even possible that the article poachers gain their "content" from multiple sources. It doesn't take much effort to copy-paste every time you see a high traffic article.

  8. Re:Chocomize! by TheLink · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Or Google could just make it easier for me to blacklist entire sites from appearing on google search.

    Currently you have to tinker around with Google's custom search[1], and it's kinda klunky when there are hundreds of linkspam sites.

    The "whack-a-mole" needs to be easier.

    Yes I even tried a few firewall plugins but they didn't work so well. Maybe things have improved since.

    [1] http://www.ehow.com/how_6752589_create-blacklist-google-search-results_.html

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