How Google Trends & News Pollute the Web 101
Danny Sullivan's hard-hitting piece at Search Engine Land calls on Google to quit being evil in one particular way: collaborating with sleazy websites that jump on Google Trends to grab advertising revenue, as Google itself rakes it in. "Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has quite famously been on record many times talking about how the Web is full of garbage. It's a cesspool out there, he's said. Today, a short fast look at how his own company pollutes the Web. ... That [example of an off-topic, trend-following] page isn't adding any value to the web. If it didn't exist, we wouldn't be the less savvy... But thanks to Google Trends, we've got a big red flag up in front of publishers that wish to pollute Google's results with this type of garbage. ... On the one hand, I love Google Trends. It's fun seeing what the top terms are that are sparking interest... On the other hand, it's clear how much [garbage] Google has caused to be generated, simply by publishing the trends. But that garbage wouldn't happen, if it didn't know it was going to be rewarded. It is, both with traffic from Google and from revenue from Google for those carrying its ads."
Chocomize! (Score:5, Funny)
His point is to write an article about how people will write articles about Chocomize to draw traffic to their site because Chocomize shows up in google trends. It allows him to use many words from google trends inside said article (I didn't count the occurences of the word "Chocomize", but I had never seen so many occurences of this word in a single page), thus drawing attention to his article.
Chocomize.
Stop that (Score:4, Funny)
Web pollution via parroting (Score:5, Funny)
I ran into bizarre web parroting-- a site took an article about my DIY satellite from "Wired", and (best guess) ran it through an English->Chinese translator then back to Chinese->English. So we end up with sentence-by-sentence content stealing, but with its own working, e.g.:
"Once deployed, they can put out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver." [from Wired]
"Once deployed, they can put out enough energy to be picked up on the belligerent by the hand-held pledge airwave receiver." [from Tubesat Gerber]
Or this bit
"Once the bastion of NASA and commercial satellite services, space has now become the final frontier for the do-it-yourselfer next door." [Wired]
"Once a bastion of NASA as well as blurb heavenly body services, space has right away turn the final limit for a do-it-yourselfer subsequent doorway." [Tubesat Gerber]
That's me, the blurb heavenly body service belligerent receiver!
A.
http://projectcalliope.com/ [projectcalliope.com] "Music from Space, Launching 2011"
Re:Tell me about it. (Score:3, Funny)
Now my regex statement is about 20K in size
I almost fainted when I read that...