Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm” | Hacker News Reader

Google Inadvertently Classifies Google Places As A “Content Farm”

techcrunch.com

113 pointsGVRV16 comments

Nice early April 1st gag. The big giveaway is him posting the "off-the-record" comment at the end. No matter how deep into AOL he gets, he'd never give up an off-the-record comment.

This is a pretty rough gag though, if not a little mean:

"That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads"

Maybe its because I was skimming, maybe its because department versus department battles in a large company feel all too natural, but I have to admit that this had me all the way until:

"It's not like people are going to start using Bing."

I am not keen on these April 1st jokes being posted on HN and it's going to get annoying with all these "true or not true" stories (especially when some truth is added to false articles). I can understand such articles making it to the frontpage of Reddit or Digg and even on Twitter but please discourage this activity from HN.

In fact HN, should do an April Fools celebration of allowing everyone to down-vote every article that is an April Fools joke.

April Fools used to be "Slashdot Vacation Day" until I stopped visiting them entirely.

I agree its probably a gag, (and the boat name doesn't check out) but I could totally imagine this sort of internecine warfare inside of Google.

This joke is a little too believable considering that Google has banned itself multiple time before. Danny Sullivan tweeted on this:

"google bans itself. april fools! wait, was real http://selnd.com/hVXAkZ & real http://selnd.com/cM5LBq & real http://selnd.com/ebJiNB :)"

Definitely april fools. The templating logic for the results page layout would obviously not be affected by the pagerank algorithm. Pagerank could not even be applied to pages which are generated using pagerank, this would entail a feedback loop.

Pleasingly deadpan prank though.

I've always wanted to pull the following April fools prank - get into the office super early and leave some controversial whiteboard sketch in several of the conference rooms (ie major reorg, acquisition, company move , etc) and just see what happens throughout the day.

It's a clever gag, but titles like this will unfortunately show up in future HN searches.

Would it be appropriate to adopt an April 1st etiquette of some sort? Say, an [April Fools] tag in the title?

[April 1st]

It's not April 1st though.

A few billion people in Asia would disagree. In Tokyo right now, it's 7am April 1.

And it's lunch time down here in NZ at the start of the world :)

Except the article url/slug says: /2011/03/31/

(I'm in HK, btw)

Once again Google is the subject of the Arrington April fools' post, always controversial.

Good for anti-competitive claims MS makes. Google claims each department tries to independently make the best product available and no favors are given to google products. This is a perfect example that google's content spam does not care if the spam comes from within google.

Also gives me lots of confidence in their webspam team.

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