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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 farm
by 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 agoI'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 agoI 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?