7 ms·

Silly Rabbits: Google is for Spam not for Search

45 points by atularora 16y ago

codeup 16y ago
Google profits more from spammy search results than from quality search results? I don't think so. Definitely not in the long run.
- samatman 16y ago
  I believe the point was more that Google profits both from spammy search results AND from quality search results. That's a conflict of interest, one well spelled-out in the original post: When removing all spam (let's pretend it's possible) will negatively impact revenue, even short-term, there's less motivation to do it.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
    why would it impact revenue if spam was removed, even temporarily? Wouldn't the people who went to spamy sites go to the "good" sites and still click on these sites thus still make google money? Unless you are suggesting that the spamy sites are the only ones available and if they disappeared searchers would not be shown results, I do not quite see why removing spam would hit the bottom line.
    - erik 16y ago
      The argument is that spamy sites are filled with Google AdWords. Removing these sites would result in less AdWords clicks, thus less revenue.
    - gojomo 16y ago
      There are several mechanisms where marginal increases in spam could increase Google's profits, as long as the effect isn't so bad people leave for another alternative entirely. (1) If the natural search result landing pages are slightly lower quality – awful writing created via lowest-bidder/freelancer content mills – but the AdWords landing pages remain higher-quality, due to more investment and ability-topay filtering, then AdWords results become more attractive to users. That's more clickthroughs and more revenues. (2) If the first page of results reviewed by a user doesn't resolve their intent, so they reformulate a more specific query, Google gets to display a second, perhaps better-targeted set of ads on the second query – a second chance at satisfying the user goal via a paid placement rather than an unpaid result. (3) If there are good natural results sites for a topic that lack ads, but others can be created with roughly the same info that have AdSense, unless Google specifically punishes sites for containing AdSense, the relative number of AdSense sites with duplicate info will multiply over time. Even if they are ever-so-lightly better (or 'as good' to low-literacy readers), and thus appear 'good' in some of Google's algorithms, they wind up wasting time in aggregate with duplication, and dilute the traffic/community of original ad-free source sites. More likely, though, they are just-enough-better in the cynical 'SEO' dimensions to display other less profit-maximized sites, and thus may be worse in the (not directly measurable) value-to-readers dimensions. Still, in the short- and medium-term, the multiplication of such sites, and replacement of AdSense-free sites with Adsence-drenched sites, makes Google money.
      - Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
        low-literacy readers? 11159 karma points does not give you the card to play mr arrogant gojo. But thank you for your explanation. I think the first point is quite clever and does make sense, but it has to be balanced with the number of visitors that google may loose by allowing the index to become spamy. The second point seems to be what everyone is thinking of and perhaps the strongest argument to suggest that google might not want to tackle spam. For that argument to gain any credibility however it needs to be shown that other search engines, i.e. bing, which perhaps do not have a conflict of interest are doing better at showing quality results. Otherwise, I think it makes it more likely that there are other reasons than conflict of interest. As to the third point, the cases that it would apply to I would think are miniscule in the grand scheme of search, not least because a very tiny minority of websites does not use ads, excluding e-commerce. Finally, I think a strong argument for google to tackle spam, and against the proposition that google does not want to, is that google would make much more money by converting more clicking visitors into customers for the adword landing page. If spamy sites have a much lower conversion of clickers for the adword customers, then cutting off these spammers would increase the conversion rate, leading to higher payments for clicks to google by adword users.
        gojomo 16y ago
        http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html Pretending these low-literacy users — 43% of the US adult population! — don't exist, or can't be discussed frankly, is less respectful than seeking to understand them. It's quite likely that these people are late adopters of web search, and thus their proportion of Google users is still rising. Consider, also, that there is evidence that lower-income, lower-education users are more likely to click on ads. I've been perplexed when discussing content mills with Googlers how they quickly assert (often in similar phrasing, suggesting a party line passed along in internal or official communications) that reasonable arguments (or very subtly, internal studies) imply many users appreciate the content mills' writing. Perhaps it's the low-literacy users who are happy to land on a mill site. Either they can't tell the difference from a quality, authoritative treatment — or maybe even the plodding, keyword-stuffed, repetitive writeups are actually reassuring for slower readers. There has to be a logical reason, other than Google venality, that such awful spamglish writing decked in AdSense ranks so highly.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    As a publicly traded company, there is always a tendency to focus on quarterly results and the bonuses attached to them rather than the long term. Because search and web advertising is only a mature industry relative to the internet and not relative to industry in general, planning ten years out is difficult if not impossible, e.g. Youtube and Facebook didn't exist ten years ago.
navyrain 16y ago
The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.
- codeup 16y ago
  Google may be experimenting to find the right balance between spam and search quality. "Right" meaning the most profitable.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    Not doing so would a breech of their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders.
    - codeup 16y ago
      No, because they could experiment with other things to make profit. Playing with spam is playing with fire. Beyond foreseeable profitability, which is what most shareholders are interested in, this would damage their reputation and their business in the long run.
    - jarrett 16y ago
      Their duty to the stockholders is to do what's in the best interest of the company. It's not a breach of duty for a company to forego short-term profits if, in the management's judgement, those short-term profits can only be had by damaging the company's long-term prospects. Google stands to make the most money in the long run by being the preferred search engine for the most people. Right now, they are. But that could change if another search engine can convince people they deliver results with less spam.
      - nervechannel 16y ago
gamble 16y ago
Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the doors to an industrial-scale search spam industry. They may have stumbled into it, but now they're in a bind because taking on the spammers would have an immediate and noticeable hit on their revenue - but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation. That's already happened. I am pretty sure that this is not intentional though. What would sway me is if say 'bing' would have zero spam and google would have a whole pile of it. Is there any research confirming or denying that?
  - gamble 16y ago
    Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
    - parfe 16y ago
      Yahoo is powered by Bing. What do you mean that DDG is basically yahoo?
      - gamble 16y ago
        DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white-label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index. AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing.
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  - 16y ago
Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
Would have been interesting to learn if the "decent" websites converted better into buying than the "spam" sites.
lysium 16y ago
Wouldn't people that click on the ad links of the spam sites also click on the ad links of the non-spam sites? So what's Google's benefit to annoy everybody with non-quality search results? I'd guess, the SEO is currently just too good.
- deleted 16y ago
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- Yzupnick 16y ago
  I think (as in I am making this up, but it makes sense to me) that spam sites bring in more revenue to Google as they are specifically designed so that people click on the adds. While non-spam sites are generally designed to deliver content.
  - uxp 16y ago
    I am no SEO expert, or even amateur. I understand the concept of pagerank, but I really don't care much for it, yet. I agree with your hunch; however, bounce rate is a relatively bad thing. If, using analytics, you see that most users navigate away from your page within 30 seconds, you probably don't have engaging content. How is that different than the user clicking on an AdSense ad because the content on a spam site isn't connecting emotionally or intellectually with the users? If anything, Google should be giving a negative score to sites that have a huge percentage of their users that actually click on ads to continue the search for what they were originally looking for... though that is basically the opposite of their business model, to have users click on ads.
deleted 16y ago
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spiffworks 16y ago
Does anybody really believe that Google engineers are stupid enough to think that it is good for them to serve spam to their users? This cockamamie conspiracy theory is getting really old.
- deleted 16y ago
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- deleted 16y ago
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- larrik 16y ago
  Perhaps it isn't up to the engineers. If Google's outward appearances seem to be deteriorating so profoundly, then it may be a reflection of something happening internally. Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet?
  - spiffworks 16y ago
    Okay, then do you think that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are stupid enough? > Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet? Matt Cutts and moultano are here all the time, saying that they're working on a solution. But for some reason, it is better to make up shit and then believe it than to actually listen to the people who talk.
    - anonymous246 16y ago
      > Okay, then do you think that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are stupid enough? People don't say "follow the money" in TV shows for no reason.
    - rorrr 16y ago
      The problem has been out for a long time. Mahalo.com is a good example. Google will lose a lot of money if they remove them from the search results. If their engineers have been working, as you say, it's the slowest fucking project ever. What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results.
shawnee_ 16y ago
Silly robots, Google Instant promotes spam, not relevant search results. . .
- lukev 16y ago
  Instant delivers the same results as with Instant turned off...
toddmorey 16y ago
Google's service to me, the customer, is fast, useful search results. There is no way they've confused their real customers for spam sites... that's just too short-sighted and there are zero barriers to people switching if a competitor with better results came along. But here's what I don't get: Lots of companies implement customer feedback to improve their services. I can't decide why Google hasn't done some sort of browser plugin (or other approach) that allows you very simply thumbs down a site when it's a not useful result. Enough negative feedback from real users and a site could be demoted in organic search. Is that just too hard to build in a way that couldn't be easily gamed? Edit: I know they experimented with voting arrows on the results page and I'm curious why some variant of that hasn't been deployed more widely.
- JeffL 16y ago
  I wonder about this, too. My guess is that they are afraid people would make fake accounts and game the system, though people are gaming the system with link farms anyway, so... I think another comment that I saw on a different article had the right idea where they should use the votes that people in your social network make, that way some Spammer making a fake account and upvoting stuff won't affect you unless you are friends with him.
- nzmsv 16y ago
  There's a Chrome extension for reporting spam: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja... No idea how seriously these reports are taken, and whether or not something like the fake Mastercam blog would be considered spam.
OmarIsmail 16y ago
There's one thing that I really don't understand with this recent trend of Google-bashing. The lack of distinction between the scraper spammers and content farms like Demand Media. The author here lists some examples of searches that have scraper results, but then goes and talks about Demand Media without any specific DM examples. Why is that? I'm not going to say that Demand Media content is world class, or even good, but it's a far cry from scraper-spam and I don't think it's honest to group the two.
- gamble 16y ago
  I'm not sure there's any moral distinction between paying a human being to rewrite Wikipedia or using a scraper to copy it. The key difference is that the later is a copyright violation, which a company like Demand Media can't do so long as they have ambitions toward legitimacy. If they could generate the content algorithmically, they would.
  - OmarIsmail 16y ago
    I think this kind of thinking is quite dangerous. Again, you're trying to lump in Demand Media/Content Farms with these scrapers and that can have dangerous consequences, because where do you draw the line? Even in an automated scraper scenario, things aren't clear cut. How much processing needs to be done on source data before it goes from illegitimate copying to value-add? Fundamentally Google is just a really really amazing scraper system. Same thing with content farms. At what point does original content go from "paraphrasing Wikipedia" to providing useful summary information? Should Wikipedia now hold a defacto monopoly on summary-style encyclopedic information?
rit 16y ago
This is Mutually Assured Destruction though. There's a delicate balance between Google profiting from spammers running google ads and the profits dropping as users trust google less and search elsewhere. In the long run, it's a losing prospect for Google: short term profits at the cost of long term reputation and trust doesn't make sense for a company as large and as public as they are.
jeffreyrusso 16y ago
I agree that it's important to distinguish between the different types of content everyone is registering grievances against... Scraped content and empty directory pages (that washing machine reviews page that has nothing more than an H1 and some crummy auto-generated sentences) vs... Mediocre human written content from sites like e-How and other Demand media properties. The first kind of content is pretty clearly spam, and doesn't deserve a place in the index. Everyone can agree on that, and I'm perplexed as to why Google hasn't taken more action against these types of sites. I have a hard time believing they can't do it algorithmically. The second type isn't as clear cut. Most of the readers here and on the cited tech/search blogs know what this content is and where it comes from, and are probably a bit more critical of it than the average user for that very reason. I agree that these article directory pages are usually painfully mediocre, but I wonder if they aren't "good enough" from the point of view of someone who doesn't know better. After all, I havent seen much of an outcry about search quality coming from the mainstream; it seems limited to HN and other tech circles.

45 points by atularora 16y ago

Google profits more from spammy search results than from quality search results? I don't think so. Definitely not in the long run.

samatman 16y ago
I believe the point was more that Google profits both from spammy search results AND from quality search results. That's a conflict of interest, one well spelled-out in the original post: When removing all spam (let's pretend it's possible) will negatively impact revenue, even short-term, there's less motivation to do it.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
  why would it impact revenue if spam was removed, even temporarily? Wouldn't the people who went to spamy sites go to the "good" sites and still click on these sites thus still make google money? Unless you are suggesting that the spamy sites are the only ones available and if they disappeared searchers would not be shown results, I do not quite see why removing spam would hit the bottom line.
  - erik 16y ago
    The argument is that spamy sites are filled with Google AdWords. Removing these sites would result in less AdWords clicks, thus less revenue.
  - gojomo 16y ago
    There are several mechanisms where marginal increases in spam could increase Google's profits, as long as the effect isn't so bad people leave for another alternative entirely. (1) If the natural search result landing pages are slightly lower quality – awful writing created via lowest-bidder/freelancer content mills – but the AdWords landing pages remain higher-quality, due to more investment and ability-topay filtering, then AdWords results become more attractive to users. That's more clickthroughs and more revenues. (2) If the first page of results reviewed by a user doesn't resolve their intent, so they reformulate a more specific query, Google gets to display a second, perhaps better-targeted set of ads on the second query – a second chance at satisfying the user goal via a paid placement rather than an unpaid result. (3) If there are good natural results sites for a topic that lack ads, but others can be created with roughly the same info that have AdSense, unless Google specifically punishes sites for containing AdSense, the relative number of AdSense sites with duplicate info will multiply over time. Even if they are ever-so-lightly better (or 'as good' to low-literacy readers), and thus appear 'good' in some of Google's algorithms, they wind up wasting time in aggregate with duplication, and dilute the traffic/community of original ad-free source sites. More likely, though, they are just-enough-better in the cynical 'SEO' dimensions to display other less profit-maximized sites, and thus may be worse in the (not directly measurable) value-to-readers dimensions. Still, in the short- and medium-term, the multiplication of such sites, and replacement of AdSense-free sites with Adsence-drenched sites, makes Google money.
    - Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
      low-literacy readers? 11159 karma points does not give you the card to play mr arrogant gojo. But thank you for your explanation. I think the first point is quite clever and does make sense, but it has to be balanced with the number of visitors that google may loose by allowing the index to become spamy. The second point seems to be what everyone is thinking of and perhaps the strongest argument to suggest that google might not want to tackle spam. For that argument to gain any credibility however it needs to be shown that other search engines, i.e. bing, which perhaps do not have a conflict of interest are doing better at showing quality results. Otherwise, I think it makes it more likely that there are other reasons than conflict of interest. As to the third point, the cases that it would apply to I would think are miniscule in the grand scheme of search, not least because a very tiny minority of websites does not use ads, excluding e-commerce. Finally, I think a strong argument for google to tackle spam, and against the proposition that google does not want to, is that google would make much more money by converting more clicking visitors into customers for the adword landing page. If spamy sites have a much lower conversion of clickers for the adword customers, then cutting off these spammers would increase the conversion rate, leading to higher payments for clicks to google by adword users.
      - gojomo 16y ago
        http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050314.html Pretending these low-literacy users — 43% of the US adult population! — don't exist, or can't be discussed frankly, is less respectful than seeking to understand them. It's quite likely that these people are late adopters of web search, and thus their proportion of Google users is still rising. Consider, also, that there is evidence that lower-income, lower-education users are more likely to click on ads. I've been perplexed when discussing content mills with Googlers how they quickly assert (often in similar phrasing, suggesting a party line passed along in internal or official communications) that reasonable arguments (or very subtly, internal studies) imply many users appreciate the content mills' writing. Perhaps it's the low-literacy users who are happy to land on a mill site. Either they can't tell the difference from a quality, authoritative treatment — or maybe even the plodding, keyword-stuffed, repetitive writeups are actually reassuring for slower readers. There has to be a logical reason, other than Google venality, that such awful spamglish writing decked in AdSense ranks so highly.
- brudgers 16y ago
  As a publicly traded company, there is always a tendency to focus on quarterly results and the bonuses attached to them rather than the long term. Because search and web advertising is only a mature industry relative to the internet and not relative to industry in general, planning ten years out is difficult if not impossible, e.g. Youtube and Facebook didn't exist ten years ago.

navyrain 16y ago

The adage "cock-up over consipiracy" comes to mind when reading this. What the author implies is that Google is knowingly keeping spam sites in their results so as to profit from them. Google is still the largest player in search by a good margin, so I suspect it is more the case that spammers are targeting their SEO spammy skills to Google's algorithm, and google just fails to withstand the onslaught.

codeup 16y ago
Google may be experimenting to find the right balance between spam and search quality. "Right" meaning the most profitable.
- brudgers 16y ago
  Not doing so would a breech of their fiduciary responsibility to their share holders.
  - codeup 16y ago
    No, because they could experiment with other things to make profit. Playing with spam is playing with fire. Beyond foreseeable profitability, which is what most shareholders are interested in, this would damage their reputation and their business in the long run.
  - jarrett 16y ago
    Their duty to the stockholders is to do what's in the best interest of the company. It's not a breach of duty for a company to forego short-term profits if, in the management's judgement, those short-term profits can only be had by damaging the company's long-term prospects. Google stands to make the most money in the long run by being the preferred search engine for the most people. Right now, they are. But that could change if another search engine can convince people they deliver results with less spam.
    - nervechannel 16y ago

gamble 16y ago

Spot-on. Google used to talk a good game about combatting search spam, but once Demand Media and the ilk called their bluff Google chose to fold and opened the doors to an industrial-scale search spam industry. They may have stumbled into it, but now they're in a bind because taking on the spammers would have an immediate and noticeable hit on their revenue - but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation.

jacquesm 16y ago
> but in the long term, surrendering to spam is going to undermine their reputation. That's already happened. I am pretty sure that this is not intentional though. What would sway me is if say 'bing' would have zero spam and google would have a whole pile of it. Is there any research confirming or denying that?
- gamble 16y ago
  Not sure about bing, but DuckDuckGo is basically Yahoo with the search spam filtered out. On heavily spammed searches DDG has become noticeably better, IMO.
  - parfe 16y ago
    Yahoo is powered by Bing. What do you mean that DDG is basically yahoo?
    - gamble 16y ago
      DDG is built on Yahoo BOSS, (Build Your Own Search Service) Yahoo's white-label search engine API. DDG adds spam filtering and some custom indexing on top, but the bulk of their data comes from Yahoo's index. AFAIK BOSS is still Yahoo technology, not bing. There may be a plan to migrate BOSS to bing.
- deleted 16y ago
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- 16y ago

Andrew_Quentin 16y ago

Would have been interesting to learn if the "decent" websites converted better into buying than the "spam" sites.

lysium 16y ago

Wouldn't people that click on the ad links of the spam sites also click on the ad links of the non-spam sites? So what's Google's benefit to annoy everybody with non-quality search results? I'd guess, the SEO is currently just too good.

deleted 16y ago
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Yzupnick 16y ago
I think (as in I am making this up, but it makes sense to me) that spam sites bring in more revenue to Google as they are specifically designed so that people click on the adds. While non-spam sites are generally designed to deliver content.
- uxp 16y ago
  I am no SEO expert, or even amateur. I understand the concept of pagerank, but I really don't care much for it, yet. I agree with your hunch; however, bounce rate is a relatively bad thing. If, using analytics, you see that most users navigate away from your page within 30 seconds, you probably don't have engaging content. How is that different than the user clicking on an AdSense ad because the content on a spam site isn't connecting emotionally or intellectually with the users? If anything, Google should be giving a negative score to sites that have a huge percentage of their users that actually click on ads to continue the search for what they were originally looking for... though that is basically the opposite of their business model, to have users click on ads.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

spiffworks 16y ago

Does anybody really believe that Google engineers are stupid enough to think that it is good for them to serve spam to their users? This cockamamie conspiracy theory is getting really old.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
larrik 16y ago
Perhaps it isn't up to the engineers. If Google's outward appearances seem to be deteriorating so profoundly, then it may be a reflection of something happening internally. Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet?
- spiffworks 16y ago
  Okay, then do you think that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are stupid enough? > Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet? Matt Cutts and moultano are here all the time, saying that they're working on a solution. But for some reason, it is better to make up shit and then believe it than to actually listen to the people who talk.
  - anonymous246 16y ago
    > Okay, then do you think that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are stupid enough? People don't say "follow the money" in TV shows for no reason.
  - rorrr 16y ago
    The problem has been out for a long time. Mahalo.com is a good example. Google will lose a lot of money if they remove them from the search results. If their engineers have been working, as you say, it's the slowest fucking project ever. What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results.

shawnee_ 16y ago

Silly robots, Google Instant promotes spam, not relevant search results. . .

lukev 16y ago
Instant delivers the same results as with Instant turned off...

toddmorey 16y ago

Google's service to me, the customer, is fast, useful search results. There is no way they've confused their real customers for spam sites... that's just too short-sighted and there are zero barriers to people switching if a competitor with better results came along. But here's what I don't get: Lots of companies implement customer feedback to improve their services. I can't decide why Google hasn't done some sort of browser plugin (or other approach) that allows you very simply thumbs down a site when it's a not useful result. Enough negative feedback from real users and a site could be demoted in organic search. Is that just too hard to build in a way that couldn't be easily gamed? Edit: I know they experimented with voting arrows on the results page and I'm curious why some variant of that hasn't been deployed more widely.

JeffL 16y ago
I wonder about this, too. My guess is that they are afraid people would make fake accounts and game the system, though people are gaming the system with link farms anyway, so... I think another comment that I saw on a different article had the right idea where they should use the votes that people in your social network make, that way some Spammer making a fake account and upvoting stuff won't affect you unless you are friends with him.
nzmsv 16y ago
There's a Chrome extension for reporting spam: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja... No idea how seriously these reports are taken, and whether or not something like the fake Mastercam blog would be considered spam.

OmarIsmail 16y ago

There's one thing that I really don't understand with this recent trend of Google-bashing. The lack of distinction between the scraper spammers and content farms like Demand Media. The author here lists some examples of searches that have scraper results, but then goes and talks about Demand Media without any specific DM examples. Why is that? I'm not going to say that Demand Media content is world class, or even good, but it's a far cry from scraper-spam and I don't think it's honest to group the two.

gamble 16y ago
I'm not sure there's any moral distinction between paying a human being to rewrite Wikipedia or using a scraper to copy it. The key difference is that the later is a copyright violation, which a company like Demand Media can't do so long as they have ambitions toward legitimacy. If they could generate the content algorithmically, they would.
- OmarIsmail 16y ago
  I think this kind of thinking is quite dangerous. Again, you're trying to lump in Demand Media/Content Farms with these scrapers and that can have dangerous consequences, because where do you draw the line? Even in an automated scraper scenario, things aren't clear cut. How much processing needs to be done on source data before it goes from illegitimate copying to value-add? Fundamentally Google is just a really really amazing scraper system. Same thing with content farms. At what point does original content go from "paraphrasing Wikipedia" to providing useful summary information? Should Wikipedia now hold a defacto monopoly on summary-style encyclopedic information?

rit 16y ago

This is Mutually Assured Destruction though. There's a delicate balance between Google profiting from spammers running google ads and the profits dropping as users trust google less and search elsewhere. In the long run, it's a losing prospect for Google: short term profits at the cost of long term reputation and trust doesn't make sense for a company as large and as public as they are.

jeffreyrusso 16y ago

I agree that it's important to distinguish between the different types of content everyone is registering grievances against... Scraped content and empty directory pages (that washing machine reviews page that has nothing more than an H1 and some crummy auto-generated sentences) vs... Mediocre human written content from sites like e-How and other Demand media properties. The first kind of content is pretty clearly spam, and doesn't deserve a place in the index. Everyone can agree on that, and I'm perplexed as to why Google hasn't taken more action against these types of sites. I have a hard time believing they can't do it algorithmically. The second type isn't as clear cut. Most of the readers here and on the cited tech/search blogs know what this content is and where it comes from, and are probably a bit more critical of it than the average user for that very reason. I agree that these article directory pages are usually painfully mediocre, but I wonder if they aren't "good enough" from the point of view of someone who doesn't know better. After all, I havent seen much of an outcry about search quality coming from the mainstream; it seems limited to HN and other tech circles.