Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Mar 01, 2006 11:32 AM
from the average-person-plus-anonymity-plus-audience dept.
The Internet Editorial
Carl Bialik writes to tell us the Wall Street Journal has an interesting look at how search engines and original content are affecting the quality of the web. From the article: "If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance. Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'? 50 Comments More | Login /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login
Keybindings Beta
Q W E
A S D
Loading ... Please wait.

  • -A-ffecting not -E-ffecting.

    Grrrrr..
    • Actually, I would say that search engines might well be effecting the content of the web. Had there been no Yahoo! back in the day, would the Web have taken off the way it did? Without search engines would we still be all on USENET and gopherspace?
      • Search engines may be effecting the quantity of the web, but they are certainly affecting the quality of the web. The WWW would be nowhere near as large as it is without search engines; but the content which existed would probably be of a higher quality.
    • This is the internet we are talking about. You have to have a lowercase i or e infront of everything.

      Like eFecting or iFecting.
      • I find it ironic that the fellow with reference to 'maths' in his id and .sig is lecturing another pedant on the inevetability of semantic drift.

        As for the subject at hand: I refuse to make excuses for people too lazy to speak or write correctly. Two wor

  • Frist pots (Score:2, Funny)

    by Merdalors (677723)
    effecting the quality of the web

    Yes, I'm effraid the web has been effected enough already.

  • There's a reason for that. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by numbski (515011) * <numbski@hksilver. n e t> on Wednesday March 01 2006, @11:39AM (#14827334) Homepage Journal
    It's because you want to cheat the system and get ranked highly to begin with.

    If you were truly "popular", you wouldn't have to worry about worthless original content.

    Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do.

    The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".

    Now, if I just made up a company name right now....let's see....Framboozleweisenschnapps.

    Nope, no hits. I want that company to program open source software.

    Of course if someone goes searching for open source software no one is going to find your company. However if you get out there and do the work, when you do online articles, post your company's name, and the work you do is evident in the online content, with time, you WILL bubble to the top.

    That's the problem. An entire world full of people, people competing in similar businesses, all wanting to be in the first 10 hits of a google search.

    Quit crying. Quit trying to cheat the system and LIVE.

    "Faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine."

    Have faith in the system, do your work, do it honestly.

    • "Faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine."
      "Analogies are like undergraduates. They can't all be clever" -- Mike Slackernerny, PhDComics [phdcomics.com]
    • Case in point...the word "Numbski" isn't a terribly popular term. If you google it, it's pretty safe that you'll find me, and my website, along with a base understand of who I am and what I do. The same goes for George W. Bush, or "Wall Street Journal".

      Q

      • In all fairness, the next two results are for Jimmy Carter and Micheal Moore. Then it is page after page of story about the results.

    • It's because you want to cheat the system and get ranked highly to begin with.


      Well said. What most companies don't seem to realise is that they have no right to be the first listing on google. They're just not that special, when everyone is making conten
    • That's the problem. An entire world full of people, people competing in similar businesses, all wanting to be in the first 10 hits of a google search.

      So, it's....uh...competition?

      I hear what you are saying but it seems to me that "being in the top 10

    • Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kelson (129150) *
      Of course, there are easier ways to trick people into landing on your site. Apparently just taking out an ad for your site with the keywords "download firefox" is enough to confuse some people [scripting.com] and get them to think you're the official Firefox download sit

  • Site rating (Score:2, Interesting)

    by metaltoad (954564)
    How can we avoid this? I think that human rating of sites either by administrators or general users could vastly improve the situation. Imagine being able to rate a site based on how well it matched your search.
    • Like DMOZ? [dmoz.org]
        • Or you get for-hire botnets that tally up positive votes for whomever is enough of a shithead to pay the slimebags.

          Your system is easily broken the first day people start to care about it.

    • Re:Site rating (Score:2, Interesting)

      by blogeasy (674237)
      Sounds a lot like social bookmarking or sites like the del.icio.us bookmarking site. I think eventually there will be some integration of this type of "voting" for sites by humans to help improve the search results. Also, some of the search engines are t
    • Why would we want to? 90% of the time my first-page search results are relevant. Good enough for me. It seems, like was said previously, that this amounts to companies whining that they aren't the first result.

      Most bad results come from bad search strin
  • I recall the situation where your page references another page which referenced another page which referenced another page... which referenced your page in the first place. So where's the original content?

    by making sure the original content gets listed fir
  • Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'?

    The worthless original content in my Journal [slashdot.org] is all my own thank you very much.

  • Best sentence of the piece (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArsenneLupin (766289) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @11:43AM (#14827390)
    In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.

    Now, everybody get on to wikipedia, and vandalize the Schroedinger's_cat [wikipedia.org] article as much as you can!

  • Doesn't the Google Page Rank display on their toolbar help with this problem?

    Unless you have some way of ranking a page, this may continue to be a problem.

    • Re:Google Page Rank? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by garcia (6573)
      Doesn't the Google Page Rank display on their toolbar help with this problem?

      Unless you have some way of ranking a page, this may continue to be a problem.

      I would guess that most people here don't use IE and thus don't have a need for Google's Toolbar and
  • Sure search engines help people find your content, but they aren't the only or even key reason why this is on the rise. Search engines have been around since roughly the beginning of the web's popular usage. What's new these days is how easy it is to do
  • Yes, this creation of worthless content for money is disgusting. People should be more like me - I blog, and create worthless content for free.
  • All of this blather about getting your site ranked by the search engines, adviews, and people setting up sites just to get ad revenue so companies can sell products to people who don't really want them is a sickness.

    Companies are so interested in this week

  • "Search Engines" or Google? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Quixote (154172) *
    Let's call a spade a spade here. 42% of Google's revenues come from AdSense, their program of putting ads on third-party websites. This will amount to about $3 Billion this year (projected, based on past growth).

    Google is making it easy and profitable fo

    • Fraud? (Score:2)

      by MarkByers (770551)
      What 'fraud' has been committed, and why can Google sue?

      If you mean that websites are breaking copyright laws, that's not Google's problem, until the original copyright owner notifies them.

  • ScuttleMonkey - It's (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shreav (195174) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @12:04PM (#14827628) Homepage
    "how search engines and original content are effecting the quality of the web."

    I'm sorry for doing this, but the word you're looking for is 'affecting', not 'effecting'.

    'Affect [reference.com]' is a verb, as in "search engines affect the quality of information on the web".

    'Effect [reference.com]' is a noun, as in cause-and-effect: "the effect that search engines have on the quality of information on the web is ...".

    Actually, I'm not sorry. They're two different words with two different meanings. What I meant is that I don't mean you any personal insult.

  • "Slashdot Breeds Worthless 'Original Content'?"
  • The overwhelming amount of information being recirculated, only serves to reinforce the law of diminishing marginal utility [wikipedia.org].
    This means that only those top ranked sites will be of any value.
  • The quality of the Web is not affected by adding poor content. The reason is the Web is not really a single thing in the way that a novel is. You do not consume the Web as a whole like reading a book but rather pick out the content which is of interest t

  • Ratings, ratings everywhere, but not a stop to thi (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jerry Coffin (824726) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @12:17PM (#14827764)
    So let's see. This story comes down to the fact that people are generally lazy, so given a choice, they'll try to accomplish their goal as easily as possible. What an amazing revelation!

    What's amazing to me is that a newspaper reporter would have the gall to try to act like this is anything new or different at all.

    The reality is that the vast majority of the "original content" in the average newspaper has (for decades) been created in nearly the same way. The majority of what they publish is no more than mildly edited versions of stories coming from outside sources. Most "business news" is no more than very mildly edited versions of press releases -- in fact, press releases often come with prewritten stories for the papers (and magazines, etc.) to publish. They'll often even have two or three stories to cover the "event" from a business angle, a human angle, etc. They'll make sure they throw in versions of a couple of different lengths as well, so it's trivial for the newspaper to carry it no matter how much or little space they need to fill.

    So what's really new here? About all I can think of is the fact that the web makes a lot of it much more transparent. It's much easier for most people to look at a dozen web sites and see they're all carrying essentially identical stories than for somebody reading a newspaper in Minnesota to see that people reading different newspapers in Alabama, California, and London are all reading essentially identical stories, each with a different "reporter's" name in the by-line.

  • effect of content on web ranking? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DeveloperAdvantage (923539) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @12:17PM (#14827766) Homepage
    I thought a large portion of google's ranking was based on how many other pages linked to your web page. If this is the case, then just having "original" content and a few key words really should not make that big of a difference in page rankings. Perhaps this article itself was just copied from somewhere and is not accurate?
  • Has this guy ever heard of tabloid journalism? Paparazzi? How about the National Enquirer? Maybe People Magazine? Their are plenty of rags in this country and around the world that regularly print content that is at BEST unsubstantiated gossip, sometime
  • Now, Wikipedia doesn't make money, and it's far from worthless, but to a large extent it is the perfect example of the kind of reprocessed content Lee Gomes is describing. Being edited by dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia can "afford" to do this on a large s
  • Often I search for something in Google, and the top 5 results INCLUDING the sponsored link are all websites that simply take your keywords and generate a list of links to other websites or perform their own searches. I mean, how on earth can Google give t
  • SEO is copy that is written to do nothing but passibly weave some keywords into a passage ostensibly about some subject.

    Search on elance for copy writers. It's nothing but offers for people to write 20 500 word 'articles' about a subject for 100 bucks.

    I do

  • Original content - fabricated content? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @12:36PM (#14828011)
    I see one danger in this hunt for "original content". Given the need that you have to have original AND if at all possible alarming content, people will start fabricating stories out of the blue, even more than they do already.

    Research costs time, and time's a scarce commodity in a medium that thrives on speed. The FIRST to have the story in will have his side read. Not the one who got all his facts right.

    So what we'll get to see are poorly, if at all, researched stories that will maybe, or not, get a revocation later. And I bet my rear that that revoc will not be high on the search engine index lists. I kinda doubt they'll META it with any relevant and a few irrelevant tags to get high level hits. Not to mention that few will link to it.

    What I can forsee is that "truth" becomes what has the most support. Not what is really true.

    Yes, even more than currently.

  • Google is dealing with this (Score:3, Informative)

    by Animats (122034) on Wednesday March 01 2006, @01:54PM (#14828943) Homepage
    In the article, the author wrote that he was hired to write copy to plug "colloidial silver". Google's first hit for "colloidial silver" is currently Quackwatch [quackwatch.org]. "Colloidal Silver: Risk Without Benefit". "Long-term use of silver preparations can lead to argyria, a condition in which silver salts deposit in the skin, eyes, and internal organs, and the skin turns ashen-gray." They have pictures.

    Google 1, search engine spammers 0.

    • The SEC Called... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Alaren (682568)

      ...to recommend that next time you want to discuss the nuances of insider trading, I personally recommend the "Post Anonymously" checkbox.

      d^_^b

    • why is it looked down upon if someone simply is trying to get ad revenue

      Read the article. The point is that usually those shysters don't want to spend the money to properly write and research the subject. Just cobble a few sentences together which look l

    • For some reason, making money on the web is looked down apon here at Slashdot (nevermind that Slashdot itself is awash in ads, and produces no original content at all). It's really just more of the double speak that comes out of wanna-be socialist's mouths
Check for more

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.