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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.'"
Compared to what exactly? I find Bing's results to be far more broken so that rules out Bing and Yahoo. What's left?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why is slashdot providing us with opinions? News = facts and context. Gossip = Some facts, some context, lots of opinions. "because its search is damn well broken..." -- do not want to hear.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
So which is it? Is Google a gorilla or a snake? Make your mind up!
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.
Believe it or not it's easier to be a good ad company if you're also a good search company. One doesn't have to suffer to the benefit of the other. It's easier to sell a product if it's a good product.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
People wont change while theres nothing better to change to...
I see some nerds switching to http://duckduckgo.com/
Belief is the currency of delusion.
...
I still don't "see" these issues with google that supposidly exist...
Never got expertSexChange.com (and the like) in your results? I get them frequently and it's annoying.
Good enough only involves being better than the competition. Which they were.
If you want to get information about how Drug $A interacts with Drug $B, Google's pretty useless - you mostly get sites that want to sell you drugs and list $A and $B, or at best lists of medical papers, usually scraped by reformatters, which have some paper on $A and another paper on $B. (Of course, if you want information on how Drug $A interacts with Drug $$V, then you're totally out of luck :-)
I've given up on Google and use Wikipedia for any medical information.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks