2010: The Year Information Pollution Takes Off | Hacker News Reader

2010: The Year Information Pollution Takes Off

seobook.com

31 pointsstakent14 comments

While I agree with SEOBook that Demand Media and their ilk are the story of the year in large scale content production and optimization, I disagree that this necessarily ushers in a new generation of low quality content in the SERPS.

Long tail search results have always been about "good enough" content as opposed to superior content. Why? Because there isn't enough volume to support superior content production at the tail.

As a searcher, I don't care if I'm looking at good enough search results / content from a niche player, or from a big company like Demand Media.

And if Demand has found an efficient way to own a big chunk of the previously fragmented long tail of search, hurray for them.

You could almost make the case that one company with economies of scale is MORE likely to be able to afford to produce quality content for low volume queries than the thousands of displaced niche publishers.

This is just another example of how cheating spreads rapidly. If lots of people are cheating then you'll eventually have to cheat to stay in the game.

Not that SEO is all cheating, but really that people are using SEO techniques to push up their content above other content just because they gamed the algorithm. Eventually everyone has to start gaming the system.

The question I have now is how much cheating can go on before it breaks. I'm curious about this in general because cheating happens a lot (e.g. our recent financial collapse brought on my non prime mortgages). Question is can we measure cheating, can we head it off before a collapse, how much can a system endure and remain stable?

huh... What little I read was interesting, yet I was constantly distracted by the sheer volume of huge, brightly colored ads or labeling. Talk about information pollution.

I was constantly distracted by the sheer volume of huge, brightly colored ads or labeling. Talk about information pollution.

http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/

Better yet, about:blank

Also: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7166

Shouldn't Google optimize it's search to find the best content, and not the other way around.

I just think it's ridiculous that Google's ranking system needs to be gamed if you want your content to be found.

I just think it's ridiculous that Google's ranking system needs to be gamed if you want your content to be found.

Why? It's just an algorithm. There's nothing magic or special about it.

It can be improved to correlate more closely with relevancy.

that is not logical because everyone wants their content found and there are only 10 spots on the first page (and adding more results per page does not fix the issue)

At some point you need a way to rank the sites

Everyone wants their content to be found, but that doesn't mean everyone's content is equally worthy based on content or relevance.

Obviously you need to rank the sites, but it just seems to me that the ranking algorithm they use doesn't correlate that well with relevance if it has to be gamed.

Google's algorithm only "needs to be gamed" if your content is unworthy or undesirable.

And if your content is unworthy or undesirable and you game it, then that forces worthy and desirable content to game it too in order to compete.

There is already way too much Information Pollution: for example, I read less than 10% of HN and other blogs/news sites have similar proportion.

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