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."
hard hitting? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell is this guy's point? Bing could release a "trends" the same as google, yet everyone is acting like google is god.
If anything, a blog post on a site called search engine land, which is all about SEO, hating on google, sounds like a competitor disliking their own competitor.
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.
Re:Chocomize! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but lets take a step back here ...
This sounds like a glitch in the search algorithm than anything else. Publishing trends is interesting, and can allow us to learn more about what we (as a species) do with the internet. This information is clearly abused by a few (who then go out and write fake page which use the popular keywords to attract attention to their page), but this is an abuse of the Trends information that google provides, not something inherently evil.
Google (or any search engine) could just tweak their results to reduce the importance of sites which are written *after* a topic became trendy. At least to give the existing articles a head start. Or I can imagine a million other ways in which they could tweak the algorithm.
But I don't think what the article is implying (that google should stop publishing Trends) should be taken seriously.
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Google (or any search engine) could just tweak their results to reduce the importance of sites which are written *after* a topic became trendy.
Yea, that might not work so well for developing news stories. Yea, a CNN puff piece on Chocomize really only needs the one article that started it, but a trend like a political election, the latest news is significantly more relevant than the first.
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They could detect articles that are duplicates of previous articles and penalize that.
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Or Google could just make it easier for me to blacklist entire sites from appearing on google search.
Currently you have to tinker around with Google's custom search[1], and it's kinda klunky when there are hundreds of linkspam sites.
The "whack-a-mole" needs to be easier.
Yes I even tried a few firewall plugins but they didn't work so well. Maybe things have improved since.
[1] http://www.ehow.com/how_6752589_create-blacklist-google-search-results_.html [ehow.com]
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/. articles are not just duplicates: editors always write a new summary of each story underlying points of interests from the original article and asking the right question about what the article implies for people interested in its subject.
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You don't actually read the articles, do you?
Or maybe you're quoting from some proposal CmdrTaco and Hemos wrote when they were still in college?
Chocomize!
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Re:Chocomize! (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it Chocomise in the UK, just out of interest?
Re:Chocomize! (Score:4, Insightful)
Or modify their ranking algorithm to smack down these spammers. For example, just pick a few very unrelated trend keywords/phrases. Then find sites which are turning up for these set of unrelated keywords. After some sanity checks, rank the sites down.
And remember that xkcd coined word ( http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/13/183221 [slashdot.org] )? You can use stuff like that to find a whole bunch of sites to exclude.
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Mod Parent Up! Everything else is just chocomize.
My new catchphrase. It is the current trend, after all.
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Those totally irrelevant spam sites were on Google News, not just general Google search.
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I still don't understand how the "trend-seeking" articles "pollute" the web, unless you are using Google as your only guide to web content.
I find that I visit many more sites from links on pages that I visit regularly than sites found searching google. An example, I suppose, would be something like Boing Boing. If you were to do a pie chart of the day's browsing, I think it would show more links coming from boing boing and slashdot and
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So in other words, he's polluting the web?
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Did...did you just say "meow"?
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I don't think he even understands how the ads work. He's viewing pages which mention chocolate, so the ads end up being about chocolate. Yet he somehow thinks that this is because of Google Trends? If he reloaded the page he'd get slightly different ads, yet he seems to talk like each page only has one set of static ads o_0
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Also should mention that I thought TFS was talking about those stupid ads you get on Google's search results that have clearly just been generated specifically tailored to your search. I thought that they were generated on the fly though, rather than from Trends.
That doesn't seem to be what the guy is beefing about.
Re:hard hitting? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think he even understands how the ads work.
All you have to understand is that
The author of the article is complaining that Google encourages poor behavior and then turns a dime on it through whatever ads end up being hosted at the websites that don't produce any actual content. You can claim they don't know this is happening or they don't care or they are laughing all the way to the bank. Either way the author appears to be correct in his analysis although you cannot be certain that Trends is where the crap websites find which terms are hot. Other sites could possibly measure this but would require a lot of indexing and resources to do so. So it's most likely Google Trends.
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So it's most likely Google Trends.
It should also be noted that the guy's only "case study" has to do with an article poached from CNN. While Google Trends makes a likely culprit, this misbehavior could just as easily have started by people watching the "top articles" on CNN.
It's even possible that the article poachers gain their "content" from multiple sources. It doesn't take much effort to copy-paste every time you see a high traffic article.
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Ah, that'll teach me to SkimTFA.
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You only see the failures to detect spam, not the successes. For every PhD Google has working on search ranking, there are probably 1000+ "dark side of SEO" people trying to subvert the system. Combining those two points, you are going to see spam sometimes.
In a related category, we still have spam email, even though there are entire companies devoted to filtering it.
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You're funny. I don't understand the internet. Um, I've been using it since 1994. That long enough for you? Been writing about search since before there was a Google. And trolled? What on earth are you talking about. I wrote a story for my readers, on my site. Someone submits it over here. Didn't ask for that to happen. Didn't encourage it. Don't even know it had happened. And that's trolling Slashdot?
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The point was in the opening paragraph of the story. Google's CEO complains that the web is full of garbage. But his own company helps generate that garbage by publishing breaking, popular topics and then failing to police the results that show up, which is handy because most of that garbage also carries ads from Google, which earns Google money.
Bing publishes trends like Google. So do many other search engines. But they don't have near the network of earning off the garbage that those trends generate, as G
Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are whole industries around SEO and it seems naive to think that people aren't going to create/alter content in order to get a higher ranking. Does it matter?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it certainly is naive to think that considering that Google encourages it [google.com] and they offer a PDF Starter Guide [googleusercontent.com] that instructs you how to alter your title, description and meta tags in your website to better your chances of coming up in the "organic" (not adwords) section of search results.
Does it matter?
Well, that's the article's argument. That it does matter because Google complains of the internet being a cesspool and yet here they are encouraging it with Trends. To you and I this is no problem. We don't care. To someone like Google that 0.1% of the end user experience might be worth millions of dollars to take care of because those end users are the eyeballs that sells their ad service to marketers of other companies. If Google perceives this to threaten the people that search their site then, yes, it does matter.
There might be some day when you sit down to use Google and you search for some popular music or terms and all you get is complete unadulterated feces on the first page of search results. And you might consider checking the other search engine pages for the same results. If this phenomena could cause that to happen then, yes, Google will care very much.
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Yes, but that will most likely be because almost all "popular music or terms" are complete unadulterated feces.
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I delete things out of my Gmail all the time... I only keep that which is unresolved. Jokes and other things are read once, and delete. Tracking numbers and receipts for purchases are deleted when I get the item and it's in working condition. If it's expensive, I'll print off a copy of the receipt and file it.
I use the inbox as a "TODO" list and deleting something from my inbox is a good feeling.
On top of that, I occasionally go into the deleted items and remove them all from there as well.
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You sir, need to look at the "archive" button.
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Because it costs nothing to archive it, and it saves you from having to make the decision of whether to save or delete it. (and the added steps to delete vs archive in gmail). It also saves you the pain of accidentally deleting something you meant to keep. You often don't realise you need something until you go to find it years from now.
Your inbox can still remain clean and you can still use "folders" to organise your mail.
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When did you last delete something out of Gmail, for example?
As soon as I download them via POP3 into Thunderbird. But then, I'm paranoid regarding my data and don't wish to leave it on hardware that I don't own and control.
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There's a difference between keeping logs of the e-mail metadata and retaining the messages themselves but I wouldn't expect an AC to make such distinctions.
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As soon as I download them via POP3 into Thunderbird. But then, I'm paranoid regarding my data and don't wish to leave it on hardware that I don't own and control.
I on the other hand view anyone who really wants to view my entire email history as completely demented and think they deserve to read the decades worth of drivel that I have accumulated as punishment for being nosy.
To be honest though, I know my bank accumulate all the data of everything I have ever bought. I know there are various secretive credit reference agencies that store all sorts of data about me. I can only ask them to send me a copy, I cannot legally stop them unless they hold inaccurate informat
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but I have long since just decided I am happy for people to know most things about me.
Good for you. I'm not.
My real name is VERY similar to my slashdot ID
Whose fault is that?
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Good for you. I'm not.
Then go live in a cave and give up making all financial transactions with anything other than cash. Sorry, but that is the world we live in.
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I use cash for most of my transactions anyway. I don't see any reason to force small businesses to pay a 2-5% tax on my purchase just so I can avoid paying for it until next month.
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I use cash for most of my transactions anyway. I don't see any reason to force small businesses to pay a 2-5% tax on my purchase just so I can avoid paying for it until next month.
Not sure about where you live, but here in the UK credit cards also give you insurance for the item purchased since they bought the item. If I buy expensive PC bits I use my credit card so if the company I buy off go broke before sending me the goods I get a refund from the bank. That is damn ass handy.
I also like not carrying very much cash around due to my fondness for getting drunk and then walking home.
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Most cards in the US don't have that kind of insurance but they do come with other benefits like chargeback protection that you won't get with cash or a debit card. I'll use a credit card for online purchases (obviously) or big ticket items but I don't feel the need to run my daily grocery purchases through it.
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About fifteen minutes ago.
In fact, I delete far more than I archive because probably 90% of the (non spam) email I receive are either trivial or of limited time value.
Except... (Score:1, Insightful)
Tell me about it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now my regex statement is about 20K in size
I almost fainted when I read that...
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Man goes blind due to Google Trends! [google.co.uk]
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Google trends hasn't helped my sight at ALL!!
You might try searching for "eyeglasses" or "contact lenses." That would help your sight.
And the solution is? (Score:5, Insightful)
So should Google shut down Google Trends? Block it from their ad customers? Somehow force them to ignore it? What the hell does he expect/want/think how in a perfect world this would work?
There's no point to this article. It's claiming an evil conspiracy just because Google Trends exists.
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They should be a little choosier about where they are willing to put ads.
Really, their other providers of advertising space are the ones who should complain, they want legitimate, high value advertising on their sites, not internet-cesspool advertising.
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> Really, their other providers of advertising space are the ones who should
> complain, they want legitimate, high value advertising on their sites...
They control what appears on their sites.
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Of course they do. But Google wants them to place Google advertising on their sites, so Google needs to avoid tarnishing the Google brand, which means Google might listen to their complaints about what Google is doing elsewhere.
Google.
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What the hell I want them to do was explained in the article:
"It shouldn’t be that hard for Google to police what shows up in response to what it publishes on Google Trends. Spam sites ought to be nabbed. AdSense sites ought to be shut down. News publishers abusing the very lucky position they have of being in Google News, by routinely tapping into Google Trends topics that aren’t relevant to their publications, should get the boot."
These aren't unreasonable things. These are things Google shoul
Tools (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, interesting trend. Don't blame the person abusing, blame the person providing. All of societies woes seemed to be blamed on the person providing a service, and not the person using it.
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The spammers would just get the trending topics from twitter or a news search or even just watching the news on TV. This is all much ado about nothing, the author just sees the spam and the trending topics and has jumped to a conclusion.
Stop that (Score:4, Funny)
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... great now this post will make this article appear as "fake" when you want to really find articles which are relevant to Britney and Lindsay ...
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> ...articles which are relevant to Britney and Lindsay ...
How can there be relevant articles about irrelevant people?
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http://www.google.com/trends?q=bdsm&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]
http://www.google.com/trends?q=vodka&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]
http://www.google.com/trends?q=anal+sex&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]
http://www.google.com/trends?q=anal+sex%2C+brokeback+mountain%2C+anal+fisting%2C+gay+porn&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]
http://www.google.co [google.com]
So Google is bad for being transparent? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The part I find most irritating is that Google also profits from the actions of the abusers (because the abusers are using Google advertising).
The problem with crowd widdom (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with naive crowd wisdom, like the one generated by Google Trends,
is that it's generally untrue that most people like what people like most.
The average "like" of people is not the "like" of the average person.
What people like most is the lowest common denominator.
Ironically, when publishers adopt that fallacy, they create the garbage that gives Google relative value, by reducing even more value from other ways of data consumption.
So the negative effect of Google Trends works great for Google.
Idea and media makes profit (Score:2, Insightful)
These guys got lucky and hope to keep going with their chocolate idea. The only thing is that they need to keep their idea going. By being near the top of Google's search list, they will make money until it wavers. The CNN news story is the ground breaking story, now they would need to advertise on Television and maybe make an appearance on a show for a few minutes to make a huge profit for the company to survive on.
Why not, (Score:1)
I probably should have invested in a helmet before suggesting anyone on slashdot use anything made by Microsoft.
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On the other hand - I did the same search at google, and lo! the results were actually fine. I guess the blogger is specifically talking about the news search results?
Will only hurt google in the end (Score:1, Redundant)
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Advertisers aren't stupid. Google ads are only worthwhile if they're actually generating revenue for the advertiser. Eventually, if they keep allowing this sort of practice, it's only going to drive down their own ad revenue (as advertisers realize they're not getting as much revenue from their ads as they once were).
If someone clicks on an advertisement then buys, does it really matter which spam site they arrived through? There's nothing that suggests they're getting less revenue; in fact, they may be getting more since the ads themselves will be relevant to what is searched for.
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In the short term, no, it does not really matter.
In the long term, yes, it does really matter. If people click through certain spam sites to make a purchase, then those spam sites are rewarded, and therefore the creation of yet more and more
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Not just trends (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would the spammers only copy trending topics? Why not just screen scrape everything from cnn.com and add ads? They do.
It just looks like they are only targeting trends because Google picks up on that stuff and aggregates it when it is a hot topic, so you see more of it.
Spammers don't need the trends, they are screen scraping everything, or just the headlines. This has been going on forever, long before "trends" existed. There are just more of them, and they are getting better at making their spam farms and increasing their page-rank, such that their screen scraped content is actually beating the site they copied from in the results.
Sadly it's only going to get worse, as it's too easy for even a single person to create many terabytes of auto-generated spam. Multiply that by the thousands of spammers doing it every minute.
The question is why can't Google fight it (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say you're right. Now Google has an index for cnn.com, and an index for spamdomain.com. Presumably the timestamps on the cnn.com pages are a bit earlier since it takes time for spamdomain.com to scrape and republish the content, and then for Google to index the new content on spamdomain.com.
I'm no computer scientist but it seems that this is the sort of data mirroring that should be pretty easy to spot algorithmically. If two domains share >80% of the exact same content, de-emphasize the one with l
Advertisers have turned the net into slime* (Score:2, Insightful)
What else is new? Try to find drivers and service manuals... Virtually all the results are spam sites.. I got better returns 20 years ago when Compuserve was king.
*Kinda reminds me of a nerdy news site that treats binspam as actual news on its front page. Eh... all part of the dumbing down process.
Implied Assumptions Are Everything (Score:2)
Can you actually replicate this article's issue? (Score:2, Insightful)
When I google for "Chocomize", my top three results are the source chocolate-making company - not spam. The fourth, the only thing remotely resembling pollution, is this searchengineland article itself.
Also, if this is an issue, I really don't think the right solution is to hide the information.
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The problem is that there *IS* an issue of spammy stuff while the topic is trending. I'm sure chocomize has died down since he wrote the article, but I also used to have trends on my desktop so I could see what was going on in the world "right now" ... but found that I ran into the exact problem he's describing.
one particularly stand out article came out with: What does FOO actually mean? as it's link title. Then the article wen ton to say "it's trending in google and we don't know". Perfect!
There are
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"
Self-correcting problem (Score:2)
If Google's trends are causing junk sites to pop into searches, people will 'trend' away from using that as their primary source of info. That or more likely they'll start looking at the host before clicking the links. Either way, 'www.chocomize.com' would be the single best source for info on this company, and we knew that with or without Google. Didn't we?
Further I resent the implication that the author knows what is decent enough for production and what isn't. This is the web. Eyeballs and brains de
Complaining about Google Trends ... (Score:1)
Start here (Score:2)
Content Farming and Demand Media (Score:3, Informative)
A US public radio show just ran a whole feature on Web 2.0 content farming [pbs.org]. Wired also ran this piece on one of the main polluters, Demand Media [wired.com], a while back, explaining how it uses algorithmically driven keyword generators that grab "hot" (ie, adclick revenue-generating) trends from, among others, source such as Google Trends, then farms out a skeleton of an article with the required keywords to an extremely poorly paid human whose job it is to string together acceptably human-readable inter-keyword verbiage to flesh out an "article".
Bullshit. (Score:2)
One can argue that Trends helps people to spam the hottest topic, but if anything, it prevents (some) scattershots of even more spam.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist (or a search scientist) to know that "oil spill" features rather high, atm. Same goes for any c-rate starlet which happened to be naked within the last month. Repeat ad infinitum.