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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

I guess if you find it helpful, nothing. I always skip their results because they're always really shallow. The kind of article you'd expect if you were paying someone $4 to research and write an article on a topic they know nothing about.

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Exactly, and there are a huge number of $4 sites out there and a large number of companies providing that kind of outsourced content generation. If you've got $100k in funding to blow, it's really easy to get your first 10,000 pages of content and a stream of SEO traffic within a few months.

I agree with Ryan that these kinds of sites are worse than scrapers because they're just as useless but algorithmically much harder to detect.

They are content farms - plain and simple. You might consider throwing about.com in there, too.

They're made to earn the employers revenue, not help out people with the particular queries.

Well, why not throw out anything ending in .com or .net? After all, they're all made to earn revenue...

I hope the point is clear -- "to earn revenue" isn't an appropriate test. But your point is well taken. I'd prefer a search to turn up the site made by the guy in the garage who is passionate about the subject rather than the $4/hr content farm content.

I think if we're to continue complaining about spam we have to actually define what we mean by spam. And I have this strange feeling that not everyone will agree...

The about.com example shows how hard distinguishing quality algorithmically gets at the margins. You do actually find stuff on about.com now and then which is pretty decent--not great but decent. You might even say the same of ehow, albeit at a much lower rate.

So you don't want to just say "these are spam."

On Quora, the former owner of eHow recently wrote[1] that when he handed over the keys to the people who bought the site, it had an excellent quality of content. This gave it a good 'credibility' on Google. When it was taken over, it was turned into a content farm, but the atrophy of credibility is possibly to disproportional to the spam parameter variable, which leaves it in Google's results. At least according to one of his listed explanations.

I recall about.com as a decent site a while ago, but I believe it was acquired a while ago by ... Yahoo!? Go figure.

I think that might be what makes it so complicated. [1]: http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Google-push-down-low-quality...

>>I recall about.com as a decent site a while ago, but I believe it was acquired a while ago by ... Yahoo!? Go figure.

About.com is owned by the New York Times Company, not Yahoo.

Why does everyone keep bashing on about.com? They've been around forever, have excellent content, and I even used their resources to learn a foreign language.

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