The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills'

Re:The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills' by gojomo on Tuesday July 27, 2010 @01:17PM (#1551923)

It's not that I actually think spending twice as much on search quality is the right decision. Just that the fact that Google could, and doesn't, reminds us that some level of management at Google is trading off search quality against other values. (As a competitive for-profit entity, profitability is high among those other values.) Even without conscious intent, if there's a saturation point where greater search quality doesn't help net profitability, or even where slightly worse quality means more profits, the organization will develop certain practices and shared rationalizations which help them converge on that optimal point.

These indirect mechanisms for avoiding quality when it conflicts with profitability may not seem malicious on their surface. In fact, here's what they might sound like instead:

I'm not sure [spending more on search quality] would help.

Even the existence of content-farms is probably a net positive. For all the crap they produce, a lot of it is filling niches in which there simply isn't any content, and the stuff they produce _is_ better than nothing.

And yes, in many searches, I would gladly sacrifice NYTimes results to get rid of EHow and its siblings. (I didn't ask to eliminate AdSense sites from every results-page, just an option to do so when I'm in a MFA-polluted category.)

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Re:The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills' by LeBleu on Tuesday July 27, 2010 @06:40PM (#1552986)

I think gojomo has a really good idea here. However, there is no reason to bias it against Google's ad network. We need an advanced search option to find non-ad supported sites, that behind the scenes attempts to filter out every known ad network. The use case wouldn't be an all the time thing, it would be when you are searching and get results that are overly polluted with ad-based content. Having the option to filter to non-ad based content lets you focus on those sites that have a motivation other than page views for providing content. I imagine this would include both sites actually selling products and non-profit sites like Wikipedia and open source.

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Re:The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills' by gojomo on Tuesday July 27, 2010 @07:26PM (#1553064)

Yes, and it could also be sensitive to the screen-area devoted to ads. As in, discard all results where >40% of the above-the-fold area is paid advertisements.

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