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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."

15 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. hard hitting? by poetmatt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What the hell is this guy's point? Bing could release a "trends" the same as google, yet everyone is acting like google is god.

    If anything, a blog post on a site called search engine land, which is all about SEO, hating on google, sounds like a competitor disliking their own competitor.

    1. Re:hard hitting? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think he even understands how the ads work.

      All you have to understand is that

      1. Google Trends tells people when a key word gets hot (like 'Chocomize').
      2. Websites of ill repute watch this and then gank content from CNN about some fluff piece on Chocomize.
      3. The websites that gank the content vie for the top seats in the "organic" part of search results (not the advertisement part of Google's search results).
      4. When the user is selects any of these websites (and in the case of chocomize there are many), they are hosting Google ads so Google actually profits from this misbehavior.

      The author of the article is complaining that Google encourages poor behavior and then turns a dime on it through whatever ads end up being hosted at the websites that don't produce any actual content. You can claim they don't know this is happening or they don't care or they are laughing all the way to the bank. Either way the author appears to be correct in his analysis although you cannot be certain that Trends is where the crap websites find which terms are hot. Other sites could possibly measure this but would require a lot of indexing and resources to do so. So it's most likely Google Trends.

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      My work here is dung.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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    Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
  4. Chocomize! by Rhaban · · Score: 4, Funny

    His point is to write an article about how people will write articles about Chocomize to draw traffic to their site because Chocomize shows up in google trends. It allows him to use many words from google trends inside said article (I didn't count the occurences of the word "Chocomize", but I had never seen so many occurences of this word in a single page), thus drawing attention to his article.

    Chocomize.

    1. Re:Chocomize! by johnhennessy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm sorry, but lets take a step back here ...

      This sounds like a glitch in the search algorithm than anything else. Publishing trends is interesting, and can allow us to learn more about what we (as a species) do with the internet. This information is clearly abused by a few (who then go out and write fake page which use the popular keywords to attract attention to their page), but this is an abuse of the Trends information that google provides, not something inherently evil.

      Google (or any search engine) could just tweak their results to reduce the importance of sites which are written *after* a topic became trendy. At least to give the existing articles a head start. Or I can imagine a million other ways in which they could tweak the algorithm.

      But I don't think what the article is implying (that google should stop publishing Trends) should be taken seriously.

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      [ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
    2. Re:Chocomize! by whencanistop · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To be fair, I think he is more ranting about the fact that he noticed that Chocomize was trending (for whatever reason) and he had to plough through hundreds of spam sites before finding the real reason that it was trending (the CNN article). Why are the spam sites there? Because the CNN article caused people to search for the term, pushed it up on Google trends, automated tools caused some sites to create new pages that Google then index higher. Google could fix this by improving their news algorithm.

      Is it Chocomise in the UK, just out of interest?

    3. Re:Chocomize! by TheLink · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or modify their ranking algorithm to smack down these spammers. For example, just pick a few very unrelated trend keywords/phrases. Then find sites which are turning up for these set of unrelated keywords. After some sanity checks, rank the sites down.

      And remember that xkcd coined word ( http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/13/183221 )? You can use stuff like that to find a whole bunch of sites to exclude.

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  5. And the solution is? by Posting=!Working · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So should Google shut down Google Trends? Block it from their ad customers? Somehow force them to ignore it? What the hell does he expect/want/think how in a perfect world this would work?

    There's no point to this article. It's claiming an evil conspiracy just because Google Trends exists.

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    This sentence no verb.
  6. Tools by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, Google is Evil because they release a useful tool that slimy people are abusing?

  7. Stop that by Drakkenmensch · · Score: 3, Funny

    Then just quit doing searches for Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

  8. So Google is bad for being transparent? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So Google is bad for being transparent and releasing data which is aggregated and highly anonymous? It is a good thing I don't run Google because after enough articles like this I'd be tempted to say "you know, we get so much crap even when we're being helpful. Let's see what happens if we just try to act really, really evil for a few months." Seriously, this criticism comes down to Google releasing interesting data which in the long run could be actually useful to sociologists and other academics. It already has been used to help accurately get an idea of where the common flu is and how bad it is at any given time http://www.google.org/flutrends/. And the complaint in TFA is that unethical people can abuse this data at the margins. The obvious question is whether that minor abuse outweighs the positive good created by having this data. At least for me, the answer seems to be know, but that's partially because I have a strong ideological commitment to transparency and openness. When in doubt, give people access to data when it can be done easily.

  9. Not just trends by shird · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would the spammers only copy trending topics? Why not just screen scrape everything from cnn.com and add ads? They do.

    It just looks like they are only targeting trends because Google picks up on that stuff and aggregates it when it is a hot topic, so you see more of it.

    Spammers don't need the trends, they are screen scraping everything, or just the headlines. This has been going on forever, long before "trends" existed. There are just more of them, and they are getting better at making their spam farms and increasing their page-rank, such that their screen scraped content is actually beating the site they copied from in the results.

    Sadly it's only going to get worse, as it's too easy for even a single person to create many terabytes of auto-generated spam. Multiply that by the thousands of spammers doing it every minute.

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    I.O.U One Sig.
  10. Web pollution via parroting by ghostlibrary · · Score: 4, Funny

    I ran into bizarre web parroting-- a site took an article about my DIY satellite from "Wired", and (best guess) ran it through an English->Chinese translator then back to Chinese->English. So we end up with sentence-by-sentence content stealing, but with its own working, e.g.:

    "Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver." [from Wired]

    "Once deployed, they can put out enough energy to be picked up on the belligerent by the hand-held pledge airwave receiver." [from Tubesat Gerber]

    Or this bit

    "Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door." [Wired]

    "Once a bastion of NASA as well as blurb heavenly body services, space has right away turn the final limit for a do-it-yourselfer subsequent doorway." [Tubesat Gerber]

    That's me, the blurb heavenly body service belligerent receiver!

    A.
    http://projectcalliope.com/ "Music from Space, Launching 2011"

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    A.