Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results

krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'"

Comments

People change.... only for something better

[djsmiley]

People wont change while theres nothing better to change to...

I still don't "see" these issues with google that supposidly exist, I know others dont see these issues iether who aren't as web savvy as me, but if they DO exist, it's only when something better comes along that people will switch, I tried bing..... and couldn't even get it to find microsoft security essentials when searching for mse as its normally know.

What scrapers?

[savanik]

I don't have this problem - when I search for things on Google, I get relevant results from real pages. Either I regularly search for things that nobody scrapes, or there's actually some skill involved in getting relevant results that most people can't be bothered with.

The biggest problem I've had of late searching on Google is trying to find reviews of hardware and getting ninety billion pages trying to sell it to me with 'Be the first person to review this product!" I need to find a different keyword on that.

mesothelioma

[mcgrew]

This puzzled me: "profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons"

I'm thinking, "Mesothelioma suits? What's that, a protective suit you wear when you're working around asbestos?"

Before Google came up I realized he was talking about lawsuits. Gees, lawyers and businessmen talking sure confuse this old nerd sometimes. To a businessman, "suit" is what lawyers bring, to a nerd, it's usually protective gear.

If you go talking about RAM here, I'm going to think "memory". If you're talking about trucks, you need to say "Dodge RAM". If you're talking about Mesothelioma suits, you need to say "Mesothelioma lawsuits unless you're talking about protection from asbestos.