Search Engines Breed Worthless 'Original Content'? 218
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."
Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2, Insightful)
-A-ffecting not -E-ffecting.
Grrrrr..
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Like eFecting or iFecting.
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
If enough people use effecting in the sense that they previously would have use affecting, then effecting will mean affecting, and it is no longer "wrong" to use 'effect' in this way.
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the subject at hand: I refuse to make excuses for people too lazy to speak or write correctly. Two words have been established, 'affect' and 'effect' and they have different meanings. Using one word in place of the other is either ignorance or apathy. And you know the difference between ignorance and apathy right?
"I don't know, and I don't care".
That may be true... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
Along similar lines... (Score:2)
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
The error above is one of spelling, not of grammar. The defense of the spelling error also is not a defense of bad grammar, it's a defense of bad spelling.
Re:Long overdue mod down coming... (Score:2)
You write quite well for someone whose reading comprehension seems to be so fundamentally lacking.
Also, six year olds are not masters of English grammar. Or do you have a statistically-valid sample of six year olds who can correctly describe the rules for making contrafactual statements in the past tense? And if they're going to demonstrate true grammatical mastery, they should be able to describe and use the various future tenses correctly. Oh, and of course the
Frist pots (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, I'm effraid the web has been effected enough already.
Re:Frist pots (Score:2)
There's a reason for that. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
Quite right. (Score:2)
Quite right: Google has a very good understanding of what search terms should link to George W. Bush [google.com].
Re:Quite right. (Score:2)
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
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 content.
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
So, it's....uh...competition?
I hear what you are saying but it seems to me that "being in the top 10" is PART of the competitive landscape, no? If it wasn't important to anyone's success, then it wouldn't be an issue. But clearly, it IS important. And that's why we have all these shenanigans to deal with.
It's really the same in the offline world
credibility indicators (Score:2)
Hmm. How about tracking the apparent age of any webs of links that point to that content? Or, for a more generalized credibility checkup, look at the domain registration. Does the
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
If you were truly "popular", you wouldn't have to worry about worthless original content.
But it goes deeper than that. It's the fact that people are unoriginal. They can't be bothered or are too ignorant of the facts to formulate their own opinion, so they promulgate information that is not their own, adding a few bits of meaningless fluff to it to make it just different enough. It's the "Me Too" phenomenon writ all over the
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:3, Informative)
This, I think, lends a bit more credence to Jakob Nielsen's anti-search diatribe [useit.com] earlier this year.
All that said, I agree with your point that in the long run, it's easier and more effective to write good content and do the necessary promotion than it is
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
The problem is that many/most people work the system backwards.
In other words, its the eternal ends vs means thing. For some reason, people equate money or desired goods with happiness and success. Few people realize that humans are social animals, and real joy (and money) comes from doing good things for people, and they gladly pay you for it.
Deception and greed will get you nowhere. The only benefit is that you are so busy being selfish and keeping
Re:There's a reason for that. (Score:2)
Site rating (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Site rating (Score:2)
Re:Site rating (Score:2)
Your system is easily broken the first day people start to care about it.
Re:Site rating (Score:2)
So, basically, my bots overwhelm yours. Still no good.
Re:Site rating (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Site rating (Score:2)
Most bad results come from bad search strings. Its amazing the amount of people who don't know how to search.
More Original content = less redundancy. (Score:2)
by making sure the original content gets listed first, the pages listed are less garbage and more content. Otherwise, the web runs the risk of becoming a collection of copied content where the original is lost.
*Hmmpf* (Score:2)
The worthless original content in my Journal [slashdot.org] is all my own thank you very much.
Re:*Hmmpf* (Score:2)
I have seen odd searches though bring people to my site because I'm one of the few people who've talked about Peter Mansbridge, and posted pictures of small town Saskatchewan, and mouldy yogurt.
Re:*Hmmpf* (Score:2)
Best sentence of the piece (Score:4, Funny)
Now, everybody get on to wikipedia, and vandalize the Schroedinger's_cat [wikipedia.org] article as much as you can!
Heisenburg (Score:2)
Re:Heisenburg (Score:2)
I believe you meant to say Heisenburg's page.
Looks like you were not uncertain about the spelling of his name.
Does wikipedia have to use redirects for every misspelling there is? It's "Hindenburg" and "Heisenberg"!
Hawthorne Effect (Score:3, Informative)
The Heisenberg Effect is a good geeky example, but the correct/ relevant the social sciences equivalent is the Hawthorne Effect. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hawthorne Effect (Score:2)
Re:Heisenburg (Score:2)
I think that perfectly describes a subtly vandalized wikipedia page. A good example of this is this page [wikipedia.org].
However, I'm afraid that by mentioning that this is a Heisenbug page, I spoiled the
Re:Best sentence of the piece (Score:2)
You know, without following that link, I have no idea if it has happened yet or not. =)
Google Page Rank? (Score:2)
Unless you have some way of ranking a page, this may continue to be a problem.
Re:Google Page Rank? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 as such don't see what ranking the page has.
Not search engines alone, the gold rush for ads (Score:2)
Publishing via blogs is ridiculously simple, and it's so interlinked that it naturally plays into the latest search enging ranking methods.
Advertising, thanks to Google Adsense (not due to Google search
A low down dirty shame (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Parasuits (Score:2)
Companies are so interested in this week's figures that they forget to make good stuff that people want. It's way easier to listen to some parasuit telling you in 50 buzzwords or less that he can make you lots of money right now.
And it's easier to plagiarize, change the wording here and there,
"Search Engines" or Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
Google is making it easy and profitable for people to engage in such behavior. The payments to AdSense participants are done via legal means (checks); hence Google has the ability to track down the offenders and sue them; and yet there has not been a single such case filed by Google for AdSense ab
Fraud? (Score:2)
If you mean that websites are breaking copyright laws, that's not Google's problem, until the original copyright owner notifies them.
Re:"Search Engines" or Google? (Score:2)
As somebody else has already commented, cases have been brought.
Google also outright bans, or refuses payment, to people who seem to have an exceptionnaly high click rate, especially bloggers (go to any blog exchange to find people moaning about it).
Re:"Search Engines" or Google? (Score:2)
I'm a Google fanboy, but am not affected by your post in the least. I hate koolaid.
Google has no authority to sue for fraud, that is a criminal thing, not a civil one. Google has worked hard against scamming SEO people, and its a cat and mouse game. Remember how Google.de unlisted bmw.de from their search engine? No lawsuit required. AFAIK, every business has the right to choose w
Everything bad must teh Google's fault. (Score:2)
You and the author are full of beans. The author claims that Google encourages wholesale plagiarism, which is nonsense. You are claiming Google has a way of detecting said plagiarism and knowingly profits f
ScuttleMonkey - It's (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:ScuttleMonkey - It's (Score:2)
Re:ScuttleMonkey - It's (Score:2)
I agree that the word he wanted was "affecting".
That said, there are perfectly legitimate uses of "affect" as a noun, and of "effect" as a verb. Using "affect" as a noun is mostly restricted to psychologists, but "effect" as a verb is reasonably widespread -- for example, a person mi
Re:ScuttleMonkey - It's (Score:2)
Not to mention bring and take, as in the university laptop article earlier today.
You take to somewhere, you bring something along with you.
You don't bring something to somebody. This is _wrong_ "Bring this to your boss." The correct is "Take this to your boss." Bring is a passive verb, take is an active one.
The vocabulary of people has at least halved or more over the past 100 years. It seems as though they can use the right words and put them in the right order. Also, our langu
But its doesn't have an apostrophe (Score:2)
Obligatory... (Score:2)
All Content is Worthless (Score:2)
This means that only those top ranked sites will be of any value.
"..are effecting the quality of the web" (Score:2, Insightful)
Ratings, ratings everywhere, but not a stop to thi (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
This is new? (Score:2)
Even TV has it's 'news magazines' that contain questionable content. Ever watch "A Current Affair"? Making up bogus content to
One word: Wikipedia (Score:2)
Wikipedia articles tend to rank quite high in search results... and, being GFDL'ed, Wikipedia's articles are copied by dozens of other mirror sites.
The scary result of all this is that I want to check a fact or find independent confirmation of an item
Re:One word: Wikipedia (Score:2)
Spam sites (Score:2)
Google was very quick to make an example out of BMW for artificially inflating their page ranking, but, I mean, BMW is an original content provider. I don't understand how Google can allow these spam
They are talking about 'SEO' junk (Score:2)
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 don't remember if they supply you with the keywords to include in your copy or not. That might be what makes a good SEO writer v. a bad SEO writer.
SEO means 'Search Engine Optimized' which means 'Generic pablum that has all the important keywords a few times
Original content - fabricated content? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Original content - fabricated content? (Score:2)
Re:Original content - fabricated content? (Score:2)
But most don't unfortunately. They read one source and accept it as the only truth.
It's akin to religion, when you think about it...
Re:Original content - fabricated content? (Score:2)
Re:Original content - fabricated content? (Score:2)
You mean like intelligent design being taught in classrooms? *ducks*
And then, if you want to be ranked even higher... (Score:2)
So what's the problem?
The problem (Score:2)
So what's the problem?
The problem is that on Slashdot, if you're a marketer, you're evil until proven otherwise.
Of course, once you start up your own company and are competing against the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, et. al., you realize that those competitors have tons of content on their sites, and thousands of inbound links, and all you have is a great product. So if you're smart, you'll start developing new content of your own that showcases your product, goes into detail about why the underlying
It's economics (Score:2)
Now, you can just spend time if you don't have dollars, and get more attention.
Or, you can spend the time getting dollars, to pay other people to get more attention.
So in some ways, search just removed the middleman. The issue is whet
Google is dealing with this (Score:3, Informative)
Google 1, search engine spammers 0.
Human intervention (Score:2)
Any system will be gamed when money can be made (Score:2)
This is part of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and it applies to competitive capitalism.
I hope that the followers of John Nash, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_nash [wikipedia.org] , will someday publish an analysis of Google from a perspective of Game theory. (Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic situations where players choose different actions in an attempt to maximize their returns.)
The people who can grok Google will become very weal
When Google becomes useless . . . (Score:2)
For example, a couple of months ago, my husband's sister called us to complain that her newish Dell has taken to running slowly, with close to 100% CPU utilization at all times. Our immediate response: malware. Our question: what did you install prior to this problem? Her answer: Party Poker.
I pop over to Google and search for "party poker" malware; "
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's True (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
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 like related to the subject and vaguely like correct English. Don't bother with fact checking and actual research.
And if you can't even come up with that, just use unoriginal content (i.e. pilfered from other sites), but change just enough words to fool th
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Re:So what? (Score:2)
I don't think the Slashdot community is against making money; I think they're all for it, IF you provide useful goods or services in the process. It's those people who are trying to make something while offering little or nothing in return that the community dislikes.
nevermind that Slashdot itself is awash in ads, and produces no original content at all
Sure it produces content. It produces the intelligent and insightful comme
Re:So what? (Score:2)
You don't seem to understand what this article is about. We're talking about people who put up a bogus site and clutter up search results making it more difficult to find the real content your're looking for. How many times have you typed in search words and linked to a site with nothing but ads and a few random blurbs about the search terms you plugged in? Happens to me all the time. And it is annoying.
-matthew
Re:So what? (Score:2)
Because it's a scam to divert people from the REAL content.
They just reword the content from someone else to try and fool people into visiting their site. Once the user gets there, he'll realise that it's all fluff and go, but he's been had, the ad company's been had, the search engine's been had, and the only winner is the scammer who made a buck by polluting the net with useless reworded copies of information he
Re:This will kill search engine and web usability (Score:2)
e.g. pc perhiperals stockport -southport
unfortunately however this won't work if they give each placename its own page.
It's been a problem for Technorati (Score:2)
The odd thing is, the keywords they choose aren't always what you'd expect to be popular spam terms. I've found some of my own posts showing up in scraped sites about things as mundane as coffee.
Re:The internet breeds worthless content (Score:2)
The cathedral and the bizarre, if you will. *rimshot*
All media breed worthless content (Score:2)
Newspaper/Magazine - tabloids
Book - bibliographies
Cell phone - "OMG that guy is so stupid!!1!1!!" right next to you on the bus when you are just trying to sleep.
email - "3n1arg3 ur p3n1s!!"
You should just say humans breed worthless content.
Re:The internet breeds worthless content (Score:2)
Re:The internet breeds worthless content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As opposed to newspapers? (Score:2)
Time and Newsweek didn't get their "I Shot My Friend" VP stories out until the whole ordeal was ten days old and every possible fact and viewpoint had already been published a zillion times. Fox News ran a story on Michael Jackson on their website every week until he moved out of the country and beyond the reach of the paparazzi. Despite being local ne