7 ms·

The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills'

81 points by ab9 16y ago

epi0Bauqu 16y ago
If anyone has domains to report, feel free to email me and I'll add them to my training set. I've recently thought about open sourcing this whole piece.
JacobAldridge 16y ago
"We cuts out what Cutts leaves in." Which is probably an unfair comment given Matt Cutts is dealing from inside a massive, listed company, but epi0Bauqu / DDG are certainly addressing a definite user experience problem. Indeed, this is a more tangible benefit for using DDG than the focus on security and privacy, which I don't believe is understood by most users.
- megablast 16y ago
  Wow, I think the statement is just a bit of fun.
  - JacobAldridge 16y ago
    I agree (I made the comment - that wasn't a quote from the article), but I wanted to clarify to ensure it didn't come across as snarky or unhelpful.
patio11 16y ago
I had a discussion with tptacek about this one day. See, I don't think Google (the search engine whose opinion's most influence my thoughts -- no offense DDG) sees content farms as a bad thing. If someone is searching for "how to make a blueberry pie", and they get an article entitled "how to make a blueberry pie", they're happy. Are they actually going to make a blueberry pie? Probably not. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they get a good blueberry pie recipe or a bad blueberry pie recipe. As long as they quickly get to a well-designed page that they won't read anyhow because no one reads on the Internet which has a few bullet points they'll skim fast and a blueberry pie picture on it, they're happy. Their blueberry pie voyeurism need is fulfilled. Content mills make that happen, for huge segments of the population. Let me strip that of euphemism: content mills make this happen for women, the elderly, and the technically disinclined. Absent the content mill, there is insufficient "organically produced" content on the things they care about on the Internet because their participation on the Internet is dramatically less than y'alls participation is and y'all -- speaking in generalities -- do not blog about good blueberry pie recipes. You can think of content mills as an organism in symbiosis with Google: how to you juice relevance algorithms to identify the sliver of a sliver of a fraction of the Internet which talks about blueberry pies and other things your mom cares about, identify the best tangentially related article, and present it to her every time? Well, you could have your crack teams of geniuses work on it for a few years, even though your favorite tricks like PageRank are likely to function less well because there's less linking data to go around. Or, in the alternative, you could encourage content farming. It surely has not escape Google's notice that their bottom line revenue increases by about 80% of the top-line revenue of the entire content farming industry, incidentally. Contextual ads are the perfect monetization vehicle for laser-targeted content produced at quality which will be solely viewed in search mode, and Google owns that entire field.
- moultano 16y ago
  I work in search quality at Google, and while certainly not everyone agrees that it's a problem, a lot of people do. I could write a lot about this, but the central issue is that it is very very hard to make changes that sacrifice on-topic-ness for good-ness that don't make the results in general worse. We're working on it though, and I suspect we'll never stop. I think a lot of the promise lies in as you said, identifying the tangentially related article, or as I like to frame it, bringing more queries into the head. We've launched a lot of changes that do exactly this. (But you are right, it is difficult, and fundamentally so. Language is hard.)
  - chubs 16y ago
    Can you please please please somehow tell someone important to get rid of those phony review sites, which when you get there have zero reviews of the item in question?
    - moultano 16y ago
      Give me some examples if you can. I'll send them around.
      - veemjeem 16y ago
        Here's a phony one: http://www.mahalo.com/3g-iphone-reviews http://www.mahalo.com/3g-iphone-reviews That site has a few thousand crappy reviews scraped from all over the place. It comes up on google all the time and it's something that I automatically ignore.
  - arohner 16y ago
    It is a problem. Things like MFA spam and Google's recent trend of being less useful as a Search Engine for Programmers (ignoring quotes, ignoring punctuation like ? and !) are enough to make me switch, if I find something better. This article has convinced me to try out DDG for a little while.
Kaizyn 16y ago
Nothing to see here. New up and coming search engine contenders don't list every site Google and Yahoo! do as a way to differentiate themselves from the well-entrenched competition.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  We live in capitalism. Communicate or survive. To address your point though, I think what is new about the article is that some search engine is trying to address a problem which annoys a lot of HNers. A problem I might say which differentiated Google from the then MSN and ALtavista etc. That is irrelevant or shallow search results.
_delirium 16y ago
This is actually interesting enough that I'm trying DDG as my default search engine for a bit currently. I probably should've already (I intellectually like what they're doing, and check it out occasionally), but Google just works well enough for inertia to keep me there. Getting content-farm results is a common daily annoyance, though, so this is the sort of thing that could make for a noticeable improvement in my Search Happiness even in the short term.
carbocation 16y ago
The article closes with, "In some sense, Blekko's approach is more democratic--if any content is good enough for your friends, it's probably good enough for you too." If I'm going to use a social search, I want to see things that: 1) Are liked by at least one of my friends. 2) Are not explicitly disliked by (a meaningful threshold, perhaps as few as 1) of my friends. And really, I'm not so sure that I trust #1, but #2 could be useful to me. Especially when "friends" gets replaced with "Hacker News," then I'm much more interested. In other words, I don't trust the sensitivity of a social network to get me what I need; I may have interests that reach beyond those of any of my associates. However, I do, to an extent, trust its specificity for identifying badness, and that's why I might consider a "social"-esque search filtering service. Actually, Gabe, have you ever considered creating some sort of collaborative filtering tool for duckduck?
jasonmorton 16y ago
This is a huge problem to address, and could be the thing that changes the dynamics of search. Google has become useless to me for a lot of searches -- many things that attract "MFA" -- because of the overwhelming amount of search spam. The problem has gotten much worse over the last few years because of the content mills presumably. Fortunately Google's still great for sufficiently obscure things that don't lead to transactions (like research papers).
jhickner 16y ago
I wish google would just implement a way to add a list of blocked domains to your search preferences. Then I'd never have to see crap from mahalo, expertsexchange, or the like ever again. A way to opt-in to using a community managed list of bad domains would be even better.
- dotcoma 16y ago
  This is such a good idea - and such a simple idea (spamcontent-block, like adblock) - that we should have had it 5 years ago already...
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Didn't google some time ago have these up and down arrows, like here on HN with comments, which I never quite learned as to what they were for. That is not quite far off from marking sites as spam and I used the up and down arrows only perhaps once in the entire time. Search is different from sites like this. Here we know we are going to spend some time reading interesting content, but not quite what we will be reading. When searching you know you needs some information and what you want to do is find it, preferably instantly, and get out of Google immediately. It is easier to click on the next link than mark some site for spam or click the up and down arrow.
- _delirium 16y ago
  When they were playing around with their SearchWiki system, there was an 'X' next to all results that you could click to make them go away, which I was pretty excited about, until I realized it didn't actually permanently banish that site; just removed it from the current results page. There are a bunch of greasemonkey scripts to let you blacklist specific sites from Google results, but relatively frequent changes to Google's results page seem to make them always fall behind, so it's hard to find a consistently working one. This is the best-maintained one I can find, and it's actually not currently working: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44418 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44418
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I don't have a problem with content mill sites -- as long as they provide me information quickly in a format I desire. I think lots of folks want "authoritative". So let's suppose I'm mentally disabled and in search of a recipe for cake. I google "cake" and I got 40,000 sites. Top of the list is the Cake Institute of America. I google airplanes and I'm looking at the history of winged flight. I want to learn to tie my shoes and spend 5 hours on the history of footwear in western culture. This is just silly. Communications 101 says that the message changes depending on the audience and the medium. Yet those in the search engine business, it seems, want "authoritative" and "best" sources. I could give a shit. I want information custom-made to me -- who I am, how I speak, my culture, my mood, my life. The "There can be only one" attitude is not helpful. Somewhere, right now, some guy wants to find out how to train speckled-bellied pigeons to dance. And those dang E-how guys probably have a video for it. Back in the day it was painful as heck to find information. Now companies are figuring out how to make each little penny they can on creating content. As long as the content is useful, I think that's awesome. Having said that, the problem is that the drunken-angry-sailor-web-content is different from the New-England-school-marm-content. That's okay. There's room for growth. Isn't progress a good thing? But the domain-squatting nonsense, and the sleaze factor some of these companies bring to the table? That's got to go. With lots more tlds I think the domain-name-spamming business has a limited shelf-life, thankfully.
rythie 16y ago
It seems for every query you really want to have good Wikipedia quality level equivalent page summarizing the best knowledge available. These content farms are trying to fill the gap where Wikipedia won't have a corresponding page, however, they do not have enough revenue per page to pay for content that is good enough.
rkalla 16y ago
Want to thank moultano (from Google) for replying to so many stories. One technique that I have manually begun employing to stop landing at what I would call value-less sites is looking at the PageRank (Chrome extension) of the host page before considering the individual story. One reader complained about the hollow/bullshit review sites that match whatever word you are searching for and then make your eyes bleed with sheer number of ads once you get there and inter-related affiliate links -- these sites never have a high page rank and can be safely ignored. I don't know if DuckDuckGo or Blekko (is that the new one in Alpha?) are going to take this type of data into consideration when ranking search results, but I sure do and it has never failed me. If you want to see a quick example of bullshit websites -- try and Google for ANYTHING health-or-weightloss-related. Try "HGH review", "Sensa review" or just about anything else that you might be curious about in the health/medical realm and I guarantee you that it will be atleast 3 pages of search results before you find a single article that is not Google-fodder that actually has real content in it. In the old days you used to be able to tell a "real" website from a "bullshit" one by looking at how pretty or professional the site is... un/fortunately the barrier to a beautiful site is much lower now and running across value-less sites that look as good as professionally developed/run sites is hard to spot instantly. This is where peeking at the PageRank of the host has helped me quite a bit. Yes it misses some things, like the case where a useless site produces 1 article that is good, but in general it keeps me sane and stops me from giving up search in general. It would be nice if there was a Chrome/Firefox extension for Google's search result page that I could click "Submit Complaint" to submit links to Google complaining about the quality of the result or the site itself. I know they would have a lot of noise to work through from something like this, but I would hope over time it would help them be able to spot patterns in these affiliate-linking-ad-smattered-nightmare sites and get rid of them.

81 points by ab9 16y ago

If anyone has domains to report, feel free to email me and I'll add them to my training set. I've recently thought about open sourcing this whole piece.

JacobAldridge 16y ago

"We cuts out what Cutts leaves in." Which is probably an unfair comment given Matt Cutts is dealing from inside a massive, listed company, but epi0Bauqu / DDG are certainly addressing a definite user experience problem. Indeed, this is a more tangible benefit for using DDG than the focus on security and privacy, which I don't believe is understood by most users.

megablast 16y ago
Wow, I think the statement is just a bit of fun.
- JacobAldridge 16y ago
  I agree (I made the comment - that wasn't a quote from the article), but I wanted to clarify to ensure it didn't come across as snarky or unhelpful.

patio11 16y ago

I had a discussion with tptacek about this one day. See, I don't think Google (the search engine whose opinion's most influence my thoughts -- no offense DDG) sees content farms as a bad thing. If someone is searching for "how to make a blueberry pie", and they get an article entitled "how to make a blueberry pie", they're happy. Are they actually going to make a blueberry pie? Probably not. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they get a good blueberry pie recipe or a bad blueberry pie recipe. As long as they quickly get to a well-designed page that they won't read anyhow because no one reads on the Internet which has a few bullet points they'll skim fast and a blueberry pie picture on it, they're happy. Their blueberry pie voyeurism need is fulfilled. Content mills make that happen, for huge segments of the population. Let me strip that of euphemism: content mills make this happen for women, the elderly, and the technically disinclined. Absent the content mill, there is insufficient "organically produced" content on the things they care about on the Internet because their participation on the Internet is dramatically less than y'alls participation is and y'all -- speaking in generalities -- do not blog about good blueberry pie recipes. You can think of content mills as an organism in symbiosis with Google: how to you juice relevance algorithms to identify the sliver of a sliver of a fraction of the Internet which talks about blueberry pies and other things your mom cares about, identify the best tangentially related article, and present it to her every time? Well, you could have your crack teams of geniuses work on it for a few years, even though your favorite tricks like PageRank are likely to function less well because there's less linking data to go around. Or, in the alternative, you could encourage content farming. It surely has not escape Google's notice that their bottom line revenue increases by about 80% of the top-line revenue of the entire content farming industry, incidentally. Contextual ads are the perfect monetization vehicle for laser-targeted content produced at quality which will be solely viewed in search mode, and Google owns that entire field.

moultano 16y ago
I work in search quality at Google, and while certainly not everyone agrees that it's a problem, a lot of people do. I could write a lot about this, but the central issue is that it is very very hard to make changes that sacrifice on-topic-ness for good-ness that don't make the results in general worse. We're working on it though, and I suspect we'll never stop. I think a lot of the promise lies in as you said, identifying the tangentially related article, or as I like to frame it, bringing more queries into the head. We've launched a lot of changes that do exactly this. (But you are right, it is difficult, and fundamentally so. Language is hard.)
- chubs 16y ago
  Can you please please please somehow tell someone important to get rid of those phony review sites, which when you get there have zero reviews of the item in question?
  - moultano 16y ago
    Give me some examples if you can. I'll send them around.
    - veemjeem 16y ago
      Here's a phony one: http://www.mahalo.com/3g-iphone-reviews http://www.mahalo.com/3g-iphone-reviews That site has a few thousand crappy reviews scraped from all over the place. It comes up on google all the time and it's something that I automatically ignore.
- arohner 16y ago
  It is a problem. Things like MFA spam and Google's recent trend of being less useful as a Search Engine for Programmers (ignoring quotes, ignoring punctuation like ? and !) are enough to make me switch, if I find something better. This article has convinced me to try out DDG for a little while.

Kaizyn 16y ago

Nothing to see here. New up and coming search engine contenders don't list every site Google and Yahoo! do as a way to differentiate themselves from the well-entrenched competition.

Ardit20 16y ago
We live in capitalism. Communicate or survive. To address your point though, I think what is new about the article is that some search engine is trying to address a problem which annoys a lot of HNers. A problem I might say which differentiated Google from the then MSN and ALtavista etc. That is irrelevant or shallow search results.

_delirium 16y ago

This is actually interesting enough that I'm trying DDG as my default search engine for a bit currently. I probably should've already (I intellectually like what they're doing, and check it out occasionally), but Google just works well enough for inertia to keep me there. Getting content-farm results is a common daily annoyance, though, so this is the sort of thing that could make for a noticeable improvement in my Search Happiness even in the short term.

carbocation 16y ago

The article closes with, "In some sense, Blekko's approach is more democratic--if any content is good enough for your friends, it's probably good enough for you too." If I'm going to use a social search, I want to see things that: 1) Are liked by at least one of my friends. 2) Are not explicitly disliked by (a meaningful threshold, perhaps as few as 1) of my friends. And really, I'm not so sure that I trust #1, but #2 could be useful to me. Especially when "friends" gets replaced with "Hacker News," then I'm much more interested. In other words, I don't trust the sensitivity of a social network to get me what I need; I may have interests that reach beyond those of any of my associates. However, I do, to an extent, trust its specificity for identifying badness, and that's why I might consider a "social"-esque search filtering service. Actually, Gabe, have you ever considered creating some sort of collaborative filtering tool for duckduck?

jasonmorton 16y ago

This is a huge problem to address, and could be the thing that changes the dynamics of search. Google has become useless to me for a lot of searches -- many things that attract "MFA" -- because of the overwhelming amount of search spam. The problem has gotten much worse over the last few years because of the content mills presumably. Fortunately Google's still great for sufficiently obscure things that don't lead to transactions (like research papers).

jhickner 16y ago

I wish google would just implement a way to add a list of blocked domains to your search preferences. Then I'd never have to see crap from mahalo, expertsexchange, or the like ever again. A way to opt-in to using a community managed list of bad domains would be even better.

dotcoma 16y ago
This is such a good idea - and such a simple idea (spamcontent-block, like adblock) - that we should have had it 5 years ago already...
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Didn't google some time ago have these up and down arrows, like here on HN with comments, which I never quite learned as to what they were for. That is not quite far off from marking sites as spam and I used the up and down arrows only perhaps once in the entire time. Search is different from sites like this. Here we know we are going to spend some time reading interesting content, but not quite what we will be reading. When searching you know you needs some information and what you want to do is find it, preferably instantly, and get out of Google immediately. It is easier to click on the next link than mark some site for spam or click the up and down arrow.
_delirium 16y ago
When they were playing around with their SearchWiki system, there was an 'X' next to all results that you could click to make them go away, which I was pretty excited about, until I realized it didn't actually permanently banish that site; just removed it from the current results page. There are a bunch of greasemonkey scripts to let you blacklist specific sites from Google results, but relatively frequent changes to Google's results page seem to make them always fall behind, so it's hard to find a consistently working one. This is the best-maintained one I can find, and it's actually not currently working: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44418 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/44418

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I don't have a problem with content mill sites -- as long as they provide me information quickly in a format I desire. I think lots of folks want "authoritative". So let's suppose I'm mentally disabled and in search of a recipe for cake. I google "cake" and I got 40,000 sites. Top of the list is the Cake Institute of America. I google airplanes and I'm looking at the history of winged flight. I want to learn to tie my shoes and spend 5 hours on the history of footwear in western culture. This is just silly. Communications 101 says that the message changes depending on the audience and the medium. Yet those in the search engine business, it seems, want "authoritative" and "best" sources. I could give a shit. I want information custom-made to me -- who I am, how I speak, my culture, my mood, my life. The "There can be only one" attitude is not helpful. Somewhere, right now, some guy wants to find out how to train speckled-bellied pigeons to dance. And those dang E-how guys probably have a video for it. Back in the day it was painful as heck to find information. Now companies are figuring out how to make each little penny they can on creating content. As long as the content is useful, I think that's awesome. Having said that, the problem is that the drunken-angry-sailor-web-content is different from the New-England-school-marm-content. That's okay. There's room for growth. Isn't progress a good thing? But the domain-squatting nonsense, and the sleaze factor some of these companies bring to the table? That's got to go. With lots more tlds I think the domain-name-spamming business has a limited shelf-life, thankfully.

rythie 16y ago

It seems for every query you really want to have good Wikipedia quality level equivalent page summarizing the best knowledge available. These content farms are trying to fill the gap where Wikipedia won't have a corresponding page, however, they do not have enough revenue per page to pay for content that is good enough.

rkalla 16y ago

Want to thank moultano (from Google) for replying to so many stories. One technique that I have manually begun employing to stop landing at what I would call value-less sites is looking at the PageRank (Chrome extension) of the host page before considering the individual story. One reader complained about the hollow/bullshit review sites that match whatever word you are searching for and then make your eyes bleed with sheer number of ads once you get there and inter-related affiliate links -- these sites never have a high page rank and can be safely ignored. I don't know if DuckDuckGo or Blekko (is that the new one in Alpha?) are going to take this type of data into consideration when ranking search results, but I sure do and it has never failed me. If you want to see a quick example of bullshit websites -- try and Google for ANYTHING health-or-weightloss-related. Try "HGH review", "Sensa review" or just about anything else that you might be curious about in the health/medical realm and I guarantee you that it will be atleast 3 pages of search results before you find a single article that is not Google-fodder that actually has real content in it. In the old days you used to be able to tell a "real" website from a "bullshit" one by looking at how pretty or professional the site is... un/fortunately the barrier to a beautiful site is much lower now and running across value-less sites that look as good as professionally developed/run sites is hard to spot instantly. This is where peeking at the PageRank of the host has helped me quite a bit. Yes it misses some things, like the case where a useless site produces 1 article that is good, but in general it keeps me sane and stops me from giving up search in general. It would be nice if there was a Chrome/Firefox extension for Google's search result page that I could click "Submit Complaint" to submit links to Google complaining about the quality of the result or the site itself. I know they would have a lot of noise to work through from something like this, but I would hope over time it would help them be able to spot patterns in these affiliate-linking-ad-smattered-nightmare sites and get rid of them.