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Google's War on Nonsense
- zig 15y agoI stopped when she "grew confused" by the weird articles. Perhaps she shouldn't be viewing webpages at all. Most people would recognize this instantly as nonsense, click the back button, and select another search result.
- ThomPete 15y agoYou clearly haven't taken the average user into consideration. The users who got confused when by accident RRW ranked higher than Facebook because of an article with the word facebook and login. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... But even for us "in the know" Try and google for photoshop tutorials and you will have to wade through endless of these fake pages. It is a real problem.
- p4bl0 15y agoWhoa. I knew some people sadly use Google even when they know the url, but this is just... wtf?! No wonder why there's so many phishing spams, people so uneducated for web usage must get owned all the time... Maybe it's time for primary school to teach children basics about how to use a computer a bit more safely. The problem with this is that every time I saw something like it, it was actually advertisement for Microsoft products dispensed by teachers who didn't knew what a url is (and they're not to blame for that).
- SandB0x 15y agoI know several highly educated people who type "google" into the Google search box in Firefox to get to Google. You and I are almost certainly doing equally bizarre and convoluted things in other areas of our lives.
- adolph 15y agoGoogle search bar is truly the command line of the Internet.
- jeffool 15y agoI don't think I ever really understood how "odd" I must seem to some people when using YubNub...
- adolph 15y agoThats pretty cool looking: http://yubnub.org/ http://yubnub.org/
- jeffool 15y agoI suppose I could've explained it... It's ideal for keyboard-heavy users. Instead of typing a search term into the search box and Ctrl+Arrow-ing to the search engine I want to use, with YubNub (in Firefox and Chrome, maybe IE?) you type in a command for what you want to do. "g FDR" does a Google search of "FDR". b Bing, y Yahoo, yt YouTube, CNN, ESPN, IMDB, and on and on. There's even some slightly stronger commands: "tr Chi Eng 晚安" uses Google Translate from Chinese to English, telling me "晚安" means "good night". Yeah, I mostly use the "g" and "yt" commands, but I love the flexibility without having to arrange search engines. I just remember a few letters/commands. For a long time I'd resorted to typing "site:imdb.com" as my first search term into a Google search box. No more. Also, you can define your own shortcuts! On a whim, I pointed XBLA to the Xbox Live marketplace at Xbox.com, and it works wonderfully. So now I can just type "xbla Trenched" and get to the page so I can buy the game with a click. A few of their "Golden Egg" commands: http://yubnub.org/kernel/golden_eggs?args= http://yubnub.org/kernel/golden_eggs?args=
- sesqu 15y agoThis functionality is actually built into Firefox and Chrome, and I'd be shocked if at least Opera didn't have it too. It's the "keyword" field in search engine settings. I believe multiple parameters are also allowed, but not having used them, can't vouch.
- Despite 15y agoThe unification of search and URL bar in Firefox, Chrome, and mobile browsers makes this even more common, at least for me. I don't always know if the browser is going to find a bookmark, something in my history, search Google, or try to open an URL.
- sili 15y agoTo use an analogy, humanity is still an equivalent of a bunch of 3 year olds alone in a middle of a busy city square as far as web maturity goes. Some might know not to wonder into the car traffic but would still fall for a stranger with a candy in his van.
- saraid216 15y agoFor what it's worth, they were definitely pushing it when I was in college, and as far as I know, it's expanding into the high school level and possibly further. And actually spreading it was an explicit goal of many librarians and librarians-to-be I knew. It could be better, certainly, but it's also being worked on.
- minikomi 15y agoDesign related spam seems to be an area where a stack exchange like site could step in and really take off.. lists of lists of lists of blogs of my favorite 50 photoshop brushes..
- chunky1994 15y agoI agree, there's a lot of tiring unrelated stuff on the internet, the only way to avoid it, sadly, is to wade through it, till you find what you're looking for.
- hernan7 15y agoSo thanks to black hat SEO spammers and related ne'er-do-wells, we are back to AltaVista times.
- api 15y agoThis brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?
- ThomPete 15y agomost of this is computer generated no? I mean look for popular headlines, terms etc construct nonsense pages and you will have a good chance of getting up there.
- Joakal 15y agoUseless is subjective. If they are being paid, then it's not considered useless work is it?
- staticshock 15y agoNo, read the linked AOL content farmer testimonial (http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-content-slave-speaks-out/ http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-co...). He was one of many people hired by AOL to write this stuff by hand, at night, for $28k.
- ssharp 15y agoIf he was being paid $28,000, he had to be producing at least $28,000 worth of value to AOL. In trying to be neutral, the articles the AOL farmer wrote had to of be of some value to produce that return (the actual required return is probably some percentage higher than the $28k)-- eyes were reading the content and there was some demand for that content. The ultimate issue should lie with the mechanisms used to drive that $28k+%return in value. If that mechanism is the Google organic funnel -> AdSense revenues, and if your demand is for quality content, isn't Google more of the problem than AOL? AOL is trying to survive and compete in a landscape where bad articles written on the cheap produce a higher aggregate value than quality articles written by authors who command a higher wage.
- AlisdairO 15y ago
- ez77 15y ago'The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.' I doubt any decent translation would turn a random Wikipedia article into vacuous prose. The style may generally be cold, maybe 'soulless' (encyclopedic?), but more often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources.
- Joakal 15y agoI think it was referring to copying content from wikipedia, translating it into a different language and then back into English. Probably one of the reasons for google to reduce the manipulation by taking down the translate API.
- tokenadult 15y agomore often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources Relevant sources "more often than not" on Wikipedia? As a Wikipedian, I have to disagree, based on my personal knowledge of what the stream of newly submitted articles looks like, what the articles identified for Guild of Copy Editors attention look like, and what long-standing articles on my watch list look like. I confess that I don't have a published source to back up my statement (or refute yours). Presumably, there is some legitimate ground for debate on what is a "relevant" source for a particular article. I do note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself thinks more work still needs to be done on improving article quality. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Improve_Content_Quality http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P... One other thing I notice is how little uptake there is from source lists posted in userspace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... into the related articles. Most editor discussions I see on a variety of article talk pages revolve around "I don't believe this," or "You miswrote this" much more than "What's a relevant source about this?" Perhaps you read mostly articles about different subjects from the articles I read on Wikipedia, and I'd love to hear about examples of articles with good sourcing in general.
- wslh 15y agoWhat's ironic with this nonsense is that it helps a lot to make progress in the NLP field. I see it like the security field where attacks and defense push to move forward. The difference is that Google offers "security through obscurity" because we don't know how their bunch of algorithms works.
- topherjaynes 15y agoAftering reading, Googled "Rick Fox's mustache' and got the article in questions as the #1 result, but isn't the gist of the article that project panda fixed this?
- whacker 15y agoIf many people are linking/searching for this contrived example, then its probably distorting the 'quality' of the article. I did not search it myself to deny them the google juice.
- Alex3917 15y agoFairly ironic considering this entire article was basically rewritten in twenty minutes from two or three original blog posts, so that the NY Times could run ads against their own version. This entire article adds exactly nothing to the originals. And what's more, whenever I check my RSS feed from the NYT I regularly see entries like this: >The 6th Floor: Sentence of the Week "Five diverse candidates this week." It seems like the NYT is just trying to distract Google from the fact that 90% of their own content is not much better than the content farmed stuff they're criticizing.
- nhebb 15y ago... especially when you consider that the New York Times owns about.com.
- AlisdairO 15y agoin fairness, I regularly find information that's actually useful to me on about.com. Not the highest quality site, but I certainly wouldn't rank it with the demand medias of this world.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- dpark 15y agoAbout.com's problem is that a lot if their articles are poor quality, meaning factually inaccurate in parts, and/or outdated. They're not generally spam, though. I'll take about.com over ehow's vacuous crap any day. How to install a sprinkler system. 1. Decide what kind of sprinkler you need for your yard. 2. Buy the sprinkler system. 3. Install the sprinkle system. 4. Test your new sprinklers. This kind of junk from ehow (and others) shows up all the time, very high in the results, when doing searches for home maintenance.
- nhebb 15y agoIn fairness, you are right. I've found a few helpful pages on about.com. (I've found a lot more unhelpful ones, though.) And even Demand Media has shining moments. Thanks to eHow, I was able to fix a jammed disposal last month.
- drblast 15y agoLast week I was reading an article about producing random text that was disturbingly close to human-produced by analyzing word frequency of massive amounts of data. It seems that it would be cheaper to produce articles this way instead of hiring low-wage workers to do it. Hmmmm...I guess there's some money in there for someone who'd stoop to that.
- bborud 15y agoA friend of mine got it into his head that there was money to be made from setting up a system to generate bullshit sites in the hopes of attracting users and creating "communities". In fact, he had a couple of these bullshit sites up and was generating a surprising amount of income from them. Of course, he insisted that they were not bullshit sites and that his intent was to turn the promising ones into "real" sites. I declined to take part in the venture because I felt this was deeply wrong. I also predicted that Google would do their best to stomp out these sites despite selling ads on them (to stop selling ads on them first they have to identify them as bullshit) and that his business might evaporate overnight. And rightly so. I hope he didn't invest too much of his own money in it. Or better yet, that he scrapped the idea altogether. Because it is a really terrible idea.
- jarin 15y agoI've got a buddy who is a paid writer for AOL/HuffPost, and he writes great, originally researched articles. I was really sad to see recently through his author feed that he's now also churning out their signature content-less keyword articles and brief summaries that link to full blog posts on other sites. At least they're uncredited, but sad to see a good writer sell out like that.
- kristianp 15y agoI think the author of this article misunderstands the panda update. It was intended to demote content farms, which have mostly automated content. The author is talking about "people working like robots", which is not the same thing at all.