Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Google Needs Our Help

One of the search engines' biggest ongoing challenges is to weed out the phony pages created not to offer content, but to steal clicks.

From search arbitrage, which generates low-cost results pages only to link to pages which generate more value for the publisher, to splogs (auto generated blogs that snip content from bloggers) to keyword artists who embed popular but unrelated topics on their web pages, there is a lot of phony content out there that is polluting the web.

Google's challenge is double in that AdWords is used by some of the jokers to create money from nothing, and the company needs to cleanse its index of plagiarized content.

In addition to the continual tweaking of algorithms, the company should invite the webizens to flag bogus content so that it is erased from the search results. Tap into the power of the community to identify BS when they see it. If enough people get irritated by meaningless results, then Google deletes the pages.

If a bogus web page isn't indexed anywhere, does it make a sound? No.

Posted By John Gartner at 11:59 AM
Permanent Link: Google Needs Our Help | Comments (3)

(3) Comments on Google Needs Our Help

Jason -

Goole should look to put a "Report Spam" link next to all of their search results. Then they could incorporate the click rate into their alog and drop them out of the index. I agree, let the community be the watchdogs!

Comments by Brent : Wednesday, August 02, 2006 at 12:55 PM

The report spam idea above is good, but then we'll send up with people just clicking their competitors (or paying someone else to click their competitors). Maybe something more along the lines of a Wikipedia 'peer' review?

Comments by Ken : Thursday, August 03, 2006 at 07:26 AM

Although I too like the idea of a web free of meaningless pages, it seems like an impossible task. If google is eliminating them, it seems spammers could produce them just as fast as the webizens could flag them?

Comments by Emma : Friday, August 04, 2006 at 01:16 PM

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