Does anybody really believe that Google engineers are stupid enough to think that it is good for them to serve spam to their users? This cockamamie conspiracy theory is getting really old.
• As a matter of policy, Google doesn't want to remove borderline spam sites (content mills, "$keyword free download" aggregators). Like Experts Exchange they might be spared as long as they bend, but not break the rules.
• Google really doesn't want to start mass manual banning (because that might be manual banning vs automated generator), and some spammers found way to sneak past Google's dupe detection algorithm.
Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet?
> Has anyone from inside Google said anything about this yet?
Matt Cutts and moultano are here all the time, saying that they're working on a solution. But for some reason, it is better to make up shit and then believe it than to actually listen to the people who talk.
People don't say "follow the money" in TV shows for no reason.
What you don't realize is that since Google went IPO, it's not all about building an amazing search engine. It's a lot about revenues and net profits. There are lots of businessmen in charge who want to make lots of money quickly, and couldn't care less about the quality of the search results.
First of all, Google went public in 2004. I would like you to point me to a study showing the steady decline in quality since that time. Who are these 'lots of businessmen' you talk about? One of the complaints about Google has actually been that they prefer to have engineers in all sorts of roles including management.
Now, since you've gone all conspiracy theorist, I have a theory of my own, I hope you will excuse it. My theory is that the pro-Apple blogging community has gone ape-shit over a perceived threat to iOS from Google, and are now looking at them as 'The enemy', and this whole rash of blog posts maligning Google is part of a larger 'Death by a thousand paper cuts' strategy to make Google seem uncool, and therefore, as we all concur, dead. I also believe that said bloggers are in fact undercover employees of Apple who get paid by the number of times they mention Apple products in reviews of their competitors' products, but that's just me being nuts.
And then you call me a conspiracy theorist, immediately followed by a pretty insane conspiracy theory about Apple community. I'm not even an Apple fan.
What I meant to say was that I've seen many reports which show a large percentage of executives at Google to be engineers and programmers, although I can't find a link right now. However, I seriously doubt that Google engineers would have gone along without revolt down a slippery slope as the one implied in the original article.
The facts are
1) Google search results are full of spam.
2) Many of the spam sites have been reported (I reported a few myself) and blogged/written about for years.
What can one conclude from that? I think there are 2 possible explanations
1) It's not in Google's financial interests
2) Google is failing at filtering spam
I doubt it's true, because simply banning the top 1000 spammy domains would cut more than 99% of the search spam. It's something that an intern can do.
If Google wants a pure algorithmic solution instead, well, good luck to them. I think until AI is smarter than humans, such solution doesn't exist. Spammers can always find loopholes in algorithms.
It most likely a much simpler explanation: web results with content explicitly generated for a specific target search string is simply getting closer and closer to being actual genuine content, and thus harder and harder to differentiate and filter.
2) Google makes a ton of money from spam sites.