More on bad search results
A few weeks back I posted about how Internet search results are filling up with spam, malware links and irrelevancies. Here’s some more evidence. Paul Kedrosky is in the financial business but he is savvy about technical things and he recently posted in his blog about his frustration with search results that he got when he tried to get information about buying a dishwasher:
Over the weekend I tried to buy a new dishwasher. Being the fine net-friendly fellow that I am, I began Google-ing for information. And Google-ing. and Google-ing. As I tweeted frustratedly at the tend of the failed exercise, “To a first approximation, the entire web is spam when it comes to appliance reviews”.
This is, of course, merely a personal example of the drive-by damage done by keyword-driven content — material created to be consumed like info-krill by Google’s algorithms. Find some popular keywords that lead to traffic and transactions, wrap some anodyne and regularly-changing content around the keywords so Google doesn’t kick you out of search results, and watch the dollars roll in as Google steers you life-support systems connected to wallets, i.e, idiot humans.
What’s your experience with searching? Are spam and ads starting to bury the sites with actual content?
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I typed “dishwasher reviews” into the Google search box and got at least 20 useful results. I don’t know what search term(s) Kedroski used, but there was very little (actually no) spam in the results I got.