late Thursday made a significant change to its search engine to try to
combat the growing number of websites that exist primarily to land high
on its rankings.
These “content farms” and other websites that produce low-quality content were damaging the usefulness of
What
called “a major improvement” was designed to highlight sites with
high-quality content and will noticeably affect about 12 percent of all
U.S. searches. It is also a clear signal that the company was also
concerned about the problem. Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who is in
charge of
“Most of the changes that we make, and we make lots of them, are nowhere close to this level of impact,” Singhal said.
It’s too soon to know whether the change will be
enough to silence critics, some of whom said before Thursday’s change
was announced that
“This is probably about the worst I’ve ever seen it,”
Critics include
with the criticism appearing not to have a significant impact on its
market share. And the company fired back at critics who have said it
has not been doing enough to keep the interests of advertisers and
users separate.
“I’m absolutely concerned about that perception because it could not be further from the truth,”
On
efforts to personalize search results may actually do more to help
advertisers target users than help searchers find what they want. And
Wadhwa, who posted an influential blog
Critics like Wadhwa accused
of not doing enough to stop content farms from manipulating its search
results. When some people invariably click on those results, they go to
pages that often include
quality “has been getting worse for the past two or three years,”
Wadhwa said. “I’ve had tremendous feedback from all around the world;
people agree with what I said.
A large share of the search company’s profit, said
Wadhwa, a researcher and writer who specializes in entrepreneurship,
education, software development and is also affiliated with
Reached after
“There must be an economic incentive to create this
kind of shallow content, this barely mediocre content,” Shum said. “Why
do they do that?
Unless
and its competitors work cooperatively to address the problem, “as an
industry, we really have a problem,” Shum said. “We really need to take
search quality very seriously; otherwise, we are all going down the
toilet.”
Industry experts differentiate between “webspam,”
when websites try to deceive search engines to gain a higher ranking,
and content farms, which produce low-quality content authored primarily
to feed popular trending topics on
Blekko, a
search startup that allows users to customize their search results,
several weeks ago began blocking all results from the 20 websites most
frequently marked by its users as being generators of poor-quality
content, including
eHow and Answerbag. The company’s executives said this week that they
plan to start aggressively defending the company’s content. Such sites
can be lucrative:
“We’re not being mealy-mouthed about this: There are good sites, and there are bad sites,” said
will lose search share if users start to believe that advertising is
influencing the search engine’s results, Cutts said.
recently introduced an anti-spam tool, dubbed “Personal Blocklist,”
that can be installed in the company’s Chrome browser and that allows
users to block specific sites. More than 75,000 people installed it
during its first week, and 84 percent of the sites users complained
about will be affected by the change. While
has allowed users some limited control of the ranking of their search
results in the past, this is the first time it has allowed users to
automatically block all results from a site.
Sullivan, who takes pains to be a neutral voice in the search wars, said the
“From the outside, it could easily look like the
wall is not so strong. But I think it’s that spammers are getting
smarter,” said Fox, who now runs Nine By Blue, an online marketing firm
in
———
BLOCKING SPAM AND ‘CONTENT FARMS’:
—On the Web: The search engine Blekko.com allows
users to click on any result to designate it as “spam,” blocking future
results from that site. And on Thursday,
—In your browser: A Google Chrome software tool at https://chrome.google.com/extensions allows users to block specific sites.
—The blocked: Blekko announced it would block
results from the top 20 websites designated as spam by its users,
including ehow.com, experts-exchange.com and naymz.com.
———
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