How Google Trends & News Pollute the Web

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."

Comments

Tell me about it.

[Skraut]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[eldavojohn]

... 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.