Google Cleans Up Content Farm Search Result Spam – Finally
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 26, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, February 26th, 2011After some high-profile tech industry grumbling, Google has finally tackled the problem of content farms like Demand Media. Now if they would just remove Huffington Post from their index, we’d be all set.
 I would have been even MORE pleased if the top result for “content farm” were now “Demand Media”. |
Let’s all take our hats off to Google for a moment for finally tackling the problem of their own crappy search results. If you have to do a lot of web research, you’ve probably noticed over the past few years that Google’s search results were getting spammier and spammier, thanks mostly to content farms like Demand Media, something we already belly-ached about a while back. Okay, now lets put our hats back on. Why did it take them so long to fix this? This was definitely a problem as long ago as 2006. It’s inconceivable that the Search Quality Team at Google hadn’t noticed it, and their recent fix seemed to come hot on the tails of the article by Michael Arrington on high-profile tech blog TechCrunch called Search Still Sucks , in which he said the thing many of us have thought for quite some time. So why did it take so long? The reasonable inference is that since Google’s largest revenue stream is ads, and content farms generated millions of page views with Google ad content, it would be a bit awkward to proactively blacklist them all. But that’s what Google has finally done; if you review lists like the ones at Search Engine Land and SYSTRIX, it’s immediately evident that the big losers in Google’s fix are mostly “Demand Media” sites. Which I find vaguely gratifying. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media, check out the PBS MediaShift series about companies like theirs. One of the most telling things about Demand Media is simply who the CEO is. While one has to acknowledge the drive and accomplishments of Richard Rosenblatt, about the only positive thing I can say about a guy who developed a company like MySpace is that he then managed to screw Rupert Murdoch by selling it to him for over half a billion dollars. In creating Demand Media, he’s shown that while he has incredibly savvy, drive, and management skills, he’s either entirely driven by the bottom line at the expense of any benefit to the human race, or utterly delusional. In this Business Insider piece about how Google’s algorithm change “hasn’t hurt their business at all” his EVP of Media and Ops says “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer“. Yes Demand Media. I’m sure today’s consumer has been clamoring for more crap content to dig through to find any actual useful information. And while my greatest complaint about Google remains more about what I’d call their “imperial overreach” – in that their near-total domination as a portal to the web is the worst thing that’s happened to search in its relatively short history – we still have to give them an incredible amount of respect. The fact that you can dip into a global library of information and extract relevant information in seconds with relative ease borders on mystical. The unfortunate thing is that if we’re using a library as the analogy here, I think we now have the problem that everyone in the world is going to try to shove their book onto the shelves, and there are no librarians on duty, just an algorithm and an advertising department. A friend asked me the other day what I thought the solution to Google’s search problem was, and I said something I’ve said for several years when answering the question: “human edited content“. While the Open Directory Project (which was based on this concept) bit the dust ages ago from internal “link whoring” corruption, it doesn’t mean that the idea won’t work. Wikipedia is a great example of fairly reliable human-edited content. Why couldn’t this work with search? In any case, although I’m suspicious – as others are – of the continued presence of crap eHow.com content in results, I’m already relieved to see fewer “HubPages.com” and “Examiner” results. I just wonder if they’re going to fix that “bookmark site that links to a blog post that links to an article on HuffPo that steals an article wholesale from another site” problem.
Facebook To Demand DNA Sample For Log In
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 5, 2011 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011In addition to the blood of your firstborn, a retinal scan, and other biometric methods. Do you trust Facebook to be the issuer of your “Internet Driver’s License”?
Sometimes I feel like I’m Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green
Google’s Chrome OS Takes All Your Computing To The Cloud
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010Awesome. But why the heck would you want to do that?
The tech industry was abuzz the last few days with talk about Google’s introduction of their Chrome OS and notebook on Tuesday. If this means nothing to you, Wired has a good in-depth look here, but in a nutshell, Google announced that they’re launching their cloud-centric operating system and web-based software store in conjunction with a lightweight laptop that has no hard disc drive, comes with a 100MB a month Verizon wireless data plan, and essentially runs all your software and stores all your files on the web. A true cloud computing experience. While I must confess to being a bit of a Goldilocks-like would-be early adopter, always pouting “this porridge is too hot” or “this porridge doesn’t have USB“, I have to say that I have absolutely NO IDEA why they’re pursuing this strategy. Well, actually I do, and suspect it’s based on some of the same trickery that Apple used to get us excited about their new device (the iPad) when what they really were selling us was a platform to buy more stuff from them. What I don’t understand is why you or I would want to follow them down this road. Or up this sky, as the case may be. The selling points that Google highlights in cute videos – like instant web, same experience everywhere, always connected – are great. But underlying all of this “don’t worry about your files and software, we’ll take care of that for you” approach is something that still troubles me. I’m sometimes accused of being a little paranoid, and forced to pull out the old William Burroughs line that “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on“. But here’s the thing. While cloud computing makes a lot of sense for a variety of enterprise scenarios, why on GoogleEarth would you want ALL of your software running on a Google server somewhere, and more importantly, all your PERSONAL FILES? The recent US government-mandated shutdowns of WikiLeaks from providers like Amazon and PayPal should be a potent reminder that if you want to keep control of your stuff, don’t give control of it to a large corporation. And perhaps especially not one whose CEO has such interesting views on privacy. Or one that has such a curious relationship with a company like Verizon. Or that wants to take your CAPS LOCK key away. But seriously, in spite of my perpetual tech cynicism, I’m intrigued to see where Google goes with the Chrome venture, enough so that I’m signing up for their pilot program in the hopes of being a test user. See Google’s introductory clip below.
Read the rest of this entry »
New Google Technology Makes Humans Superfluous
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 14, 2010 by admin in Technology
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010Google’s search technology has become so good at predicting what you want to search that they’ll soon be doing away with you altogether.
Words could never begin to express the sense of relief I felt today when I read on the Google Blog that they’ve finally developed technology to do away with the human element altogether. After more than two years of generating original content every day, I run out of juice occasionally, and I was starting to worry that I would become one of the millions of user-generated content generators that fails to generate, and ends up apologizing for why I haven’t posted recently. By the way, if you need to filter the 111,000,000 results from that link, there’s a blog for that. And although I have some regrets that this new Google technology will render my existence unnecessary, in a way I’m looking forward to doing whatever it was that I did before the Internet came along. If only I can remember what it was without Googling it. In any case, until Google activates this new, completely human-free web, you may be interested to know that that as a user-generated content generator, you can already build an entire web site without even resorting to the content farms I was making fun of a few weeks ago. That’s right. Primal Pages lets you enter a phrase, and then assembles existing content from around the web for you. After you answer the question “What are you thinking about?”, you really don’t have to make any more conscious decisions except whether or not to click the “publish” button. As their tagline says: “If the website you need doesn’t exist, let Primal Pages build it for you in seconds.” I for one welcome this human elementless web, although I didn’t go down without a struggle. I thought that if I made a YouTube clip of a letter to Google using Google Scribe, that the Internet search deity might lend an ear. Clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Google: Please Stop Finishing My Sentences For Me
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 8, 2010 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010I personally find Google Instant more annoying than useful. But I have 786,240,000 seconds to kill.
When a friend of mine’s two year old son doesn’t like something, he uses an expression which I find handy. He says “I can’t like it“. That’s my reaction to Google Instant. As googletastically amazing as I’m obliged to say that it is – for fear of being perceived as a Luddite – it mostly just gets on my nerves. There are a number of reasons I’ll probably keep the feature disabled, but primary amongst them is the fact that it mimics one of my few pet peeves, which is when people try to finish my sentences for me. My thinking is far too erratic most of the time for people to ever get it right. I mean, it wouldn’t bother me if they did get it right, but they almost never do. And since Google’s results have become so blogjammed anyway, I feel like I’m just getting often mediocre results faster. Which I don’t find all that gratifying. One of Google’s biggest sell points is that since they’ve determined that it saves you 2-5 seconds per search, they can make the cute claim that “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second“. Personally, I have the time to waste. If I live to the age of 75, I have about 786,240,000 seconds left. And if I did 50 searches a day for the rest of my life, that would only be about 456,250 searches, which – with the cantankerously slow “old school” method, clocking in at around 9 seconds per search – would only take me about 4 million seconds. I’ll wait. For the record, I have other objections that have to do with tools that control us rather than the other way around. A few of them are summarized nicely in this piece, which points out not only how much control the feature gives Google over word usage, but how the new feature affects how ads are displayed. I think Google Instant is more about creating Buzz than a good user experience. What about you? By the way. Thanks for not interrupting. Read the rest of this entry »