Vivek Wadhwa is critical of Google. He is apparently a prof at UC-Berkley. Hopefully that doesn’t mean he is a liberal dickbag. Why do I bring this man up? Because he came out with an interesting article about Google and the web sewers it serves. Apparently he had a project in which he instructed his students to use Google to search for information. He must not read Lost Ball because what he discovered was the web sewer. We’ve been exploring the sewers all year.
The article was a fun read. For instance:
…it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money.
Shocking I know. Our very existence is to land on the first page, slot #1, in Google. We want these search fuckers to click. We create fake review sites. Know nothing information sites. We spam the web with our article gooey goodness. We build auto blogs crammed with nothing but garbage information and tons of links to click for money delight.
Remember how popular Yahoo was? I know, but it really was the tits. Then came Google and it’s glorious simplicity. Yahoo is now a portal without a useful search engine. Google is headed down the same path. At some point someone is going to create a search engine that is useful again. And all us spammers and markets are going to be out of fucking luck. Sit around and watch someone search the web that has no idea that they are being marketed to. They have a hard time finding the information they are looking for and resent the results. The sheer volume of marketers are killing Google.
Anyway, these scholarly fuckers began using Blekko. It is clearly a smarter way to search using something they call slash tags. This type of search is bound to fuck with Google.
Wadhwa continues his brilliant analysis:
The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.)
No shit. Have a look at the utter CRAP in Warrior Forum. Look at all the products and discussions on how to game Google vis-à-vis articles, bookmarks, Twitter, Facebook, etc. People are solely concerned how to best stroke Google.
Wadhwa relates a bloggers experience searching for information on a product they wanted to buy:
This (marketing) is exactly what blogger Paul Kedrosky found when trying to buy a dishwasher. He wrote about how he began Googleing for information…and Googleing…and Googleing. He couldn’t make head or tail of the results. Paul concluded that the “the entire web is spam when it comes to major appliance reviews”.
He even talks about the web sewers. I am a visionary:
Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web (emphasis added). And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.
He closes in saying he wants a better search experience. I have said repeatedly that relying solely on the goodness of Google is an eventual fail. People will be looking for a better search experience. They are getting sick of the shit splattered through the sewers.
The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.
{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Try searching for information related to a type of muscle injury in Google – you’ll spend hours trawling through scrapers, Q&As and content mills (ehow and EA seem to pop up continuously – surely Google know nothing on these sites is worth anything? Especially for technical medical niches). Broad searches are pretty good – longtails are full of crap. From a searchers point of view it’s very frustrating – although I guess the marketers do pretty well out of it.
Maybe my search strings are too specific and there’s no good content related to them, but I doubt it. Google really needs to start cleaning up its act! And this from someone who spends most of his time trying to game the SEs
I’m sure if Blekko starts to get popular there will be a way of gaming it too….have to admit I haven’t really looked into how it works though.
Just checked my top sites / terms in Bleko and found everything present and correct.
If a handful of spenders look like they might be starting to give a shit about Bleko products like “Super Bleko Slash Tag Annihilator Armageddon Pro” will soon follow.
My biggest worry right now is Google Places / Maps and other forms of results that are not based solely on the volume of craplinx pointing at a given mothership.
Why does scum rise to the top of a septic tank?
Because it is designed that way!
Interesting to see several of my floaters at the top of blekko serps.
I think you sparked a new scummy niche idea – thank you.
Sure, but beware of the “spam” button. A very interesting development.
Happy new year splork. Hope 2011 will be successful for you in IM endeavours.
Do you use yahoo answers to funnel traffic to your money site?
In your last post you talked about that submerging the website with hundreds of links makes google noticed and they possibly ban your account.but using lot of lens, hubs, wordpress blogs to funnel traffic requires also links from these funnel sites to your money site which means lot of links and again G will be noticed also.
Do you find this logical ?
Well, I guess this doesn’t mean much to you Splork, since you are able to get a vast majority of your traffic outside of Google! That is something a lot of people struggle with… nowadays we need to diversify everything, income sources, now even diversifying traffic sources is coming to be a great idea too
Goobler, lol.. There a Major Scraper. I really like how they dont like anyone else getting a piece of the pie, well years ago they did.. but they saw others coin, and said.. hey.. me wants it! (My preee….)
dishwasher = Link Spamming Safe.
The only way to have total control of the Quality of there search would be to control all the sites, or information.
Why would they do that? They can Scrap your sites and earn dime.
They know there not the only Traffic Game in town.
BackLinks = Goobler But F*uck.
I noticed the ‘spam’ button too. Wonder how easy it is on bleko to ‘spam’ your competitor?
I did a simple search for ‘slimming help’ and the usual sites appeared, except that the NYTimes was at number one with a celebrity slimming article. So how good Bleko will be for normal searchers, I don’t know.
LOL. I just put some of my keywords in Blekko and I guarantee you their results are full of crap spam too. Just different sites but the same old garbage.
The simple fact is that for every 100% legitimate site that can really help you and is exactly what you are looking for, there are 100 sites that are less than ideal (from the web sewer as you would say).
Now how can a machine (Google) that can’t read and make decisions like a human can ever make a correct choice with those odds? It has to be some formula and that formula is always going to be able to be manipulated to some degree at least.
It’s the age old Internet debate between high minded academic elitists and progressive corporatists who don’t want their Internet sullied with advertising and us great unwashed merchants and marketers who would like to make a buck anyway we can.
What concerns me isn’t so much that there are too many advertising sites but that corporatists like Obama and Schmidt will find a way via regulation, taxation, net neuterality and such to force us little guys off the Internet. I’d rather get a bunch of advertising sites when I search than only getting sites ‘approved’ by a bunch of corporatist progressive elitists in Washington and Mountain View.
I’m guessing that Blekko updates are less frequent than Google. I can see some of my old flotsam near the top – which have now been flushed by Google.
The “spam” button is interesting – but wide open to abuse. Will we shortly see a WSO which will build you 2,000 profiles links, bookmark 5,000 times and hit the spam button on your top competitor 1,000 times?
A Happy New Year to you and all your readers.
Best Regards
Hey Simon – Well I love to be found in Google, I just don’t spend a lot of time working on it…to my detriment I suppose.
Hamish – The spam button is only for your use. If you do a search on something and do not like the first 5 entries you can spam it and it will never be back in your searches again. You can personalize the amount of spam you want or don’t want.
Frank – Net neutrality is a bad thing for us little guys. Unfortunately a vast number of online geeks, hipsters and youngsters supported Obama and now they will reep what they sowed as it were. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for capitalism. More the merrier. I just wish someone would come up with a useful search engine, you know, when you are actually looking for information you can use. Something like a Blekko could at some point have the ability to filter out what you personally consider junk.
I don’t think the idea of Blekko is that it will get rid of spam or keep marketers from the front page or radically change the results you see. What I think it has the potential to do is personalize how you search. Stick with a standard search and you’re liable to get a standard result. It’s not until you utilize their “slashtags” that you fine tune your results. Google will take notice. Two years ago Bing was new and I suggested it was cool and people thought that idea was shit. Well funny how Google added some Bing functionality to their own results. It is also in Beta and simply a different idea.
thanks for the link to that techcrunch article
It is inevitable…All the marketers will be wiped out by Google in one big algo change eventually. Vivek Wadhwa will rejoice when this happens along with many others. Though, I can see Google soon will implement their own “spam” button to help weed out personal search for anyone who objects to certain sites.
This article is such a great endorsement of your sewage anaology I would’ve thought you paid the guy, Splork! Spot on.
Exactly why I want to explore building a social following that is not dependent on G traffic whatsoever …
Best,
Scott
The day those voting buttons appeared in Google I read a post about using botnets to manipulate it.
I never used those voting butons, I guess no one else did either as they are gone… as is that stupid wiki thing Google thought they could use to get people to review sites they were on.
That spam button will hammered into the ground the day Blekko starts to matter.
All I see happening is Google retreating further and further up the ladder, sending more traffic to lager authoritive sites and less to crappy little squibs. The problem with that is that they will innevitably shut out a lot of useful information contained on small sites with no links… the kind of sites built by enthusiasts of some obscure topic… the kind of thing Google built a reputation helping people find.
I also think that the likes of us make to big a deal of it. We are emersed in this stuff, 99.99% of “the herd” could not give a toss about this stuff, they use google and for the most part they are very happy with it. If one of the 99.99% read this post they would have absolutely no idea what we were talking about.
Ignorance is bliss, and Google still serves up the kind of results most people want… eventually.
Ya’ll ain’t getting the spam button in the Blekko results. It is not a vote. It is to manage the results you personally get. If you would enjoy seeing 30 listings of crap fake Amazon product reviews then by all means you can enjoy those without worry that the rest of the Blekko searchers feels they are garbage. But in my listings they will never show up in a search I do when I click them as spam.
I’m not sure you give the herd much credit. They care about getting real listings more than you think. They know spam. They know Google is teetering toward crapdom.
Let’s hope 2011 is the year that Google pulls the plug on much of the sewage. I searched for a hotel in a particular UK city last year, and I couldn’t find the hotel’s official site amongst all the sewage of affiliate sites, aggregator sites and MFA sites.
If many more niches end up like this then Google’s usefulness is gone.
Now Blekko’s added a Spam Clock: http://searchengineland.com/blekko-launches-spam-clock-to-keep-pressure-on-google-60634
I agree with Jez. No one I know even remotely understands what I do even after I explain it to them MULTIPLE times. Most folks have no clue how the Internet works or even that anything is an affiliate link. Affiliate link? What the hell is that?
The herd are real people out in the real world with jobs. They actually spend VERY LITTLE time on the Internet and go there to do a few things and then leave. They AREN’T “liking” things on Facebook and reTweeting stuff like you may think. The people that do that are the 1% who are nerds, geeks, people have no lives, and people who are infatuated with the online world.
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