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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
This sentence no verb.
So, Google is Evil because they release a useful tool that slimy people are abusing?
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.
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.
I.O.U One Sig.
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"
A.