Follow-up on bad search results
A previous post cited Paul Kedrosky’s frustration with the search results he obtained while looking for a dishwasher. To further quote Kedrosky, he said:
The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.
To follow up on Kedrosky’s contention that the top listed sites were disguised advertisements, Chris Dixon has analyzed the top links in a search for dishwasher reviews to see what the sites really are. His results are at All Things Digital:
In a post last week, Paul Kedrosky noted his frustration when looking for a new dishwasher using Google. I thought it might be interesting to do some forensics to see which sites rank highly and why.
Read his analysis; it’s revealing. For one thing, he unearths a fake blog:
This site appears has two goals: 1) fool Google into thinking it’s a blog about dishwashers and 2) link to consumersearch.com.
He concludes:
So who created this fake blog? It could have been Consumersearch, or a “black hat” SEO consultant, or someone in an affiliate program that Consumersearch doesn’t even know. I’m not trying to imply that Consumersearch did anything wrong. The problem is systematic. When you have a multibillion dollar economy built around keywords and links, the ultimate “products” optimize for just that: keywords and links. The incentive to create quality content diminishes.
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