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Google Goes After Content Farms

Posted by Soulskill on from the cleaning-up-the-e-streets dept.

RedEaredSlider writes "Aimed at stripping search results of pages from 'low-quality' sites, a new Google Chrome extension allows users to block specified websites from appearing in search results. The names of these sites are then sent to Google, which will study the collected results and use them to determine future page ranking systems. Google principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a post on the Google blog that the company hopes the extension will improve the quality of search results. The company has been the target of criticism in recent months, much of which centered around the effect that content farms were having on searches."

3 of 345 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Paywall sites are going to be hit pretty hard by Mouldy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A trick I learnt with experts exchange is that the posts are actually accessible. You just have to scroll past the "GIMMER ALL YER MONEY" messages and you get to the original text. Experts Exchange's paywall is a simple example, but if Google's indexer can read past the paywall, there's no reason why you can't. Sometimes, if a site serves different content to people than to spiders, you can just click on the "cached" link in Google's results page to see the version that Google indexed.

  2. Could also be used for evil... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Google already "charges" for increased search "relevancy" and gives massive discounts to large bulk buyers (think Amazon, Ebay, etc)... What happens when my legit sites start getting pruned for lack of payment... er... relevancy? Google already sticks it to small businesses with Adwords rates that are uncompetitive when compared to huge advertisers, so what would stop them from not doing the same in this realm? Don't be evil? right...

  3. Google already had this feature by skomes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What really pisses me off is that google already had this feature. Personalized search results used to let you relegate some websites to the bottom and mark some results and sites as being more important. It was incredibly useful when filtering out garbage spam sites. Google also said were would be able to share these in some way to improve search results. Then for no reason they removed that feature and replaced it with the ability to put a gold star on some results. Of course the benefit of the feature was in relegating spam up the bottom of the page and you could no longer do that. When they removed they feature I stopped using the feature entirely. Now google is backtracking by introducing this extension. What was entre point of removing the original feature which worked on all browsers?