Around the Net
Google Wants To Get Rid of 'Content Farms'
- eWeek, Tuesday, February 15, 2011 12:04 PM
Making good on its promise to rid the world of "content farms" one piece of worthless content at a time, Google just introduced a Chrome extension that lets users block specific web sites from appearing in search results. What's more, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts says the search giant will analyze blocked sites, and likely use that information to alter search rankings.
"What Cutts means is Google is asking for users to help weed out content farms, which he defined as 'sites with shallow or low-quality content,'" eWeek explains. "Content farms, including those such as Demand Media, have proven to be a huge bugbear for pushing Websites chock full of ads that clutter up Google's search results."
"All you unpaid journalists and guardians of content quality can finally take revenge on the content arms clogging up your search results," exclaims The Atlantic. For its part, "By releasing Personal Blocklist, Google aims to demonstrate that it puts search quality above revenue quantity," writes InformationWeek.
But, will the initiative really curtail content farms? Not likely, according to paidContent, "considering all of the asterisks involved (users have to have Chrome and install the extension and specify the sites they want to block)."Calling the Blocklist a "quick hack," TechCrunch writes: "This is an odd move on Google's part, as users will still have to find the extension (not everyone reads tech blogs), opt in and consistently edit their results to offer any kind of valuable data."
What's more, VentureBeat says the Blocklist seems susceptible to error and manipulation. For one, "By creating such an explicit way to influence results, Google might be opening the door to content farms that hire people to download the extension and manipulate the results." All the same, as Fast Company notes, Demand Media -- which recently went public at a $1.5 billion valuation -- did warn in its filing that this sort of content filtering could eventually require a new business model.
A simple google toolbar checklist box:
1. Block (user choice)
2. Warn (redirect to/from a content farm)
Then a chrome/firefox/opera/safari extension to handle the above.
Shouldn't take Google more than a day to test.
Will this stop content farming?
Let's think about that problem. First, the major offenders are well-known, so you can down-rank them by URL alone. Thus the point is not actually to down-rank them, but to nudge them south in search results very carefully, and watch what a zillion search users a day do with those altered results. On short searches, if they happily select other sites (presumably of greater value), everything's good. If they select results further down the list, or enter longer search terms because immediate results weren't what they wanted, you reassess, because your net may have caught sites of value to some, but not perhaps to others.
Given Google's huge daily volume of queries, it doesn't take the global userbase long to thoroughly re-explore any part of the normal search space. So there's no need for them to commit to altered rankings and "live with the results forever." They can apply altered rankings in short time-windows, then revert, and get very definitive results. So all they really need is an approximate _hint_ about which sites might be bogus, and the vast engine of usage will work the problem for them very fast.
In practical terms, they could derive this list of hints by throwing darts at a board -- so it's rather nice they should let smart people contribute. They might get -- what? 5K or 10K users of this extension, of which 500 or so will be smart, highly-motivated people. And those will quickly assemble a workable hint-list that will improve over time, and then the vast human engine will grind, grind, grind, fix any problems, grind, grind, grind.
For the past 13 years (since Google) we have agonized as to why The Auto Channel with more than 1 million pages of served on-site content, many times was listed lower (or not at all) in search results...maybe this new move by Google will move search results to be more relevant and reward those sites that actually care about and support editorial content.