Everything I ever saw on a content farm looked like it was written by somebody who knew nothing about the topic, but did a quick Google search and extracted some semi-random bullet points from the first few things they saw. Basically, I could get the same value by clicking on the first non-content-farm link and then skimming.
If only there were a way to search multiple content farm sites at once, and rank those results according to how useful they were...
If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out"
was that so hard?
The point was that they've been successfully more aggressively penalized, to the point where many of these sites are now no longer showing up more.
> If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out" was that so hard?
That defeats the primary purpose of using a general search engine - namely to get ranked results across a large number of sites.
I wish there was a way in Google to indicate you'd like to see results from a site ranked higher FOR YOU. I imagine they already learn that when you click on that domain in two separate searches.
Often when you search for a "how do I" question, the content farms are the only things that produce a result that's even vaguely topical, at least before Pandas.
I mean, it usually went content farms -> Pure SEO spam -> actual relevant results. Content farms weren't good, but they still beat the SEO spammers. At least the content farms had some minimal connection to the topic, unlike say eBay.