Google asks users to help fight content farms

February 14, 2011 5:41 PM
Anthony Ha
Add a Comment

There’s been a lot of discussion about the quality of Google’s search results recently, particularly its ability to filter out “content farms” filled with low-quality articles that are written to appeal more to search engines than readers. Today, Googler Matt Cutts revealed a new weapon in the company’s attempt to block spammy content.

With a new extension for Google’s web browser Chrome, people will be able to block websites that they don’t want to see anymore, presumably because the content is always useless. (You can always click a button at the bottom of your search results to show what was blocked, and you can also edit your list of blocked sites, so these decisions aren’t permanent.) Google can then use the extension to collect data about which sites are being blocked, which it can feed back into its search results.

It seems like there are some big risks involved in letting the data shape general web search results. Google is famously secretive about the details of its ranking system, even when it announces improvements, because it doesn’t want companies to know how to game the system. By creating such an explicit way to influence results, Google might be opening the door to content farms that hire people to download the extension and manipulate the results.

content farmPlus, there’s the inherent uncertainty about why someone is blocking a site. For example, there are a number of tech news sites that I might block because their content never interests me, but that doesn’t mean I’m telling Google that the content is spammy.

At least this system seems a little harder to game, since there’s no way for someone to say something should be ranked more highly. So spammers might be able to attack their rivals, but if a bunch of real users block their content, there’s no way to erase that. Plus, Google is still being a bit cagey about its exact strategy, saying “will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.” So presumably it will find ways to avoid gaming and other irregularities, or it will just scrap the experiment if it doesn’t seem to be working.

  • http://twitter.com/webbuildersZA web builder

    Any efforts are worthwhile efforts. Even if this does not actively solve the problem, it speaks volumes that it's a recognised scourge; And any attempts will fuel experience and help identify better ways to eliminate these farms.

  • http://www.venturebeat.com Anthony Ha

    I agree that this is a worthwhile effort, but I don't think I can get
    on-board with the idea that “any efforts are worthwhile efforts”. What about
    initiatives that end up penalizing a bunch of non-content-farm sites as
    well? I would imagine that's one reason that this has been such a hard
    problem to solve.

  • CourtneyRam

    Since the primary motivator for these spam publishers is earning Adsense money, I'm glad Google is taking steps to clean up the problem they created.

  • http://twitter.com/queryfreewriter Jennifer Mattern

    Keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing new about Google letting individuals influence search results b/c of competitive interests. The same thing happened when they decided to dictate what kinds of advertising were and weren't acceptable on sites (as in text link ads unless you were willing to alter your code — sometimes extensively for large sites with many of these ads — because their algorithms couldn't sort the garbage from relevant and worthwhile ads). At that point in time they asked people to report others publishing or buying paid links, and the same old questions came up. My thoughts are this: If Google was willing to do the same and go after independent publishers with quality content and equally high quality advertising choices just because they had a problem with an ad model, then they should absolutely use similar tactics to weed content farm garbage out of our search results. If anything, this is far safer because nowhere did they say one individual's report will lead to de-indexing or ranking penalties. It's about what people on a larger scale consider search engine spam. They're going into this understanding that individual user choices have little to do with spam. But collectively those results say a lot — and it's about time they started listening on the content farm issues (despite the tech community's late entrance in the discussion, it's been going on for years now).

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Nonya/100001132540562 Mike Nonya

    LOL GOOGLE STARTED AS A CONTENT FARM!!! Seriously, did becoming huge and rich make you noobs? You're a company that started as a search engine…. How more of a content farmer can one company be? Don't be evil… Oh, I see you're already being evil.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Nonya/100001132540562 Mike Nonya

    Oh, and do content farmers count as spammers? Not even the same thing! Content farmer: A person that uses other sources and produces a commentary on said content. A spammer: Some company that could careless what you don't want in your mail box, in respect to adds, offers, etc.Google, I don't need a search engine to see where you're going with this. Time to locate an alternative.

blog comments powered by Disqus