4 ms·

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

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.
- gamble 16y ago
  It ranks highly because the content farms target long-tail searches where it's easy for marginal content to dominate the results. They are in a sense arbitrageurs. They use software to located search terms where the revenue from ads outweighs the cost of commissioning and ranking a low-quality page.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
  Ahh, sorry, I do apologise. I thought you were referring to whoever I quoted that said good sites. But thanks for the link, very informative. I suppose if 40% of internet users are low-literacy then such sites as about.com sort of make sense. I think we need to differentiate between content mills and spam sites though. Although many do not like content mills, I would not consider them spam but low quality content. Spam sites seem to be more reliant on affiliate marketing, especially in the review of products niche, as well as monetised by adsense. I do however think that it would help the discussion immensely if adword users can provide some data as to how does the quality of the site compare with conversion. I would assume that the higher the quality of the site content, the better the conversion, but, assumptions can be wrong.

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.

gamble 16y ago
It ranks highly because the content farms target long-tail searches where it's easy for marginal content to dominate the results. They are in a sense arbitrageurs. They use software to located search terms where the revenue from ads outweighs the cost of commissioning and ranking a low-quality page.
Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
Ahh, sorry, I do apologise. I thought you were referring to whoever I quoted that said good sites. But thanks for the link, very informative. I suppose if 40% of internet users are low-literacy then such sites as about.com sort of make sense. I think we need to differentiate between content mills and spam sites though. Although many do not like content mills, I would not consider them spam but low quality content. Spam sites seem to be more reliant on affiliate marketing, especially in the review of products niche, as well as monetised by adsense. I do however think that it would help the discussion immensely if adword users can provide some data as to how does the quality of the site compare with conversion. I would assume that the higher the quality of the site content, the better the conversion, but, assumptions can be wrong.