Google's Next Challenge, Spam Results 238
krou writes "The Guardian's tech blog is running an interesting piece on Google's next big challenge, which is dealing with the spammers it helped create. 'Google is the 900-pound gorilla of search, with around 90% of the market (excluding China and Russia), and there's an entire industry which has grown up specifically around tickling the gorilla to make it happy and enrich the ticklers.' They quote Paul Kedrosky who notes that 'Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.' Whether searching for reviews, products, businesses, or even conducting academic research, scraper sites are ranking higher than original content. The article speculates that Google may try fix the problem but, from Google's perspective, most of these type of sites use AdSense ads, and generate revenue for Google (89% of clicks come from the first page of results), so Google may not have an incentive to change things too much. Alternatively, people could stop using Google, 'because its search is damn well broken... The question is whether it would be visible enough — that is, whether enough people would do it — that it would show up on Google's radar and be made a priority.'"
Broken? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Playing the game changes the game (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not it's easier to be a good ad company if you're also a good search company. One doesn't have to suffer to the benefit of the other. It's easier to sell a product if it's a good product.
Re:Somebody else will come along, eventually. (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone does, who will find out about it first: users or Google? If Google finds out first, they just have to stop the revenue-generating pollution to a degree that they remain best, and no one will ever know that the newcomer had briefly been better.
For all its "brokenness" Google just has to remain best and they'll win. And if that brokenness is a result of allowing noise because it makes them money, rather than a technology limitation, then it's something they have control of. I wouldn't bet on Google losing any time soon.
Re:People change.... only for something better (Score:4, Insightful)
...
I still don't "see" these issues with google that supposidly exist...
Never got expertSexChange.com (and the like) in your results? I get them frequently and it's annoying.
Re:What scrapers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Try doing any programming or system administration related search and *not* have at least one of the first five results populated with the following worthless domains:
- experts-exchange.com
- ehow.com
- about.com
- scribd.com
- ittoolbox.com
These sites don't necessarily scrape and repost content, but the content they do provide is invariably worthless or too difficult to navigate in order to be worth my time. In fact, I really don't mind mailing list, wikipedia, and StackOverflow scrapers because at least they provide useful content as long as you block all the ads and javascript by default.
Spammers have gotten pretty darn good at figuring out how to game Google and Google's countermeasures are increasingly ineffective. What Google really needs to do is place some control over the results returned in the user's hand. I would pay actual money to Google if they would let me customize search results as follows:
- A way to mark results as useful or not for the query entered, and refine later searches based on those
- Blacklist certain domains from showing up in my results, ever.
- Add content qualification (for example, prefer sites that have a certain text-to-graphics ratio)
Re:You're wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)