If you have been frustrated lately by search results on Google, you’re not alone, and Google knows it.
There’s been a drumbeat of criticism of Google’s search results coming out of Silicon Valley — and now the Internet giant has responded, saying it has heard “the feedback from the Web loud and clear” and believes it “can and should do better.”
In particular, the company is talking about stopping “content farms,” which provide low-quality, often unreliable and sometimes plagiarized information on a certain topic, just to get traffic from search.
Google has been making changes to its algorithm to keep low-quality sites from appearing high in searches, search guru and principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in an official blog post Friday.
But he also writes that, despite Google’s efforts, “The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.”
It’s unclear whether today’s post has anything to do with yesterday’s announcementthat co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as chief executive. But the mea culpa highlights one of the big questions Google has been facing lately: whether its search quality has taken a hit.
Just this month, there have been several posts from prominent tech insiders lamenting the state of Google results.
“Google has become a jungle: A tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to Web sites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search,” wrote University of California at Berkeley visiting scholar Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch.
Software developer Jeff Atwood has complained about content farms in particular. “Last year, something strange happened: The content syndicators began to regularly outrank us in Google for our own content,” he wrote.
Content farms, in general, publish thousands of Web pages a day in an effort to draw views from Google searches. A Wired article from 2009 described their goal this way: “To predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results.”
Sometimes the goal is achieved through low-quality but original articles and videos. Sometimes the sites cut and paste or compile content written elsewhere and use “search-engine optimization” techniques to get their own pages to appear higher in results.
In fairness, content farms are a problem that all major search engines are facing — but Google gets the lion’s share of the attention because it has the lion’s share of the search market.
And Google makes the point that it has made significant progress against “search spam,” in which sites patently lie about what is on the page, inserting keywords to attract people to sites that don’t actually have appropriate content at all.
“A decade ago, the spam situation was so bad that search engines would regularly return off-topic webspam for many different searches. For the most part, Google has successfully beaten back that type of ‘pure webspam,’” Mr. Cutts writes.
Content farms, however, are a different story — much trickier, and when you get down to it, just as annoying for readers.
Google’s algorithm proved to be fairly adept at detecting blatant lies about what was on the page. But information from content farms really is pertinent to the search terms at hand — even if it’s not actually what the reader wants. It’s something that a human is easily able to recognize, but maybe computer intelligence isn’t quite there yet.
And if Google’s algorithm just favors “trusted” sites like major media companies, that could create problems for sites that are obscure but contain legitimate information.
It was a nice idea. Today the unemployment rate is hovering above 9 percent—better than it would have been without the stimulus, most experts agree, but still painfully high. Why didn’t we get more for our money?
While liberals and conservatives alike blame the stimulus itself—It wasn’t big enough! It was never going to work!—the problem may have more to do with how the money was spent. It’s not enough just to inject money into infrastructure, because not all transportation funding is created equal—or at least, it doesn’t create jobs at an equal rate. As any infrastructure policy wonk can tell you, money spent on fixing up existing systems or building mass transit delivers more jobs, and faster, than building new highways. With their wallets bulging with their federal allowance, the states were allowed to spend $26.6 billion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money however they saw fit.
A new study shows that most states didn’t end up making the most of the windfall. The report by the transportation research group Smart Growth America found that states spent more than a third of the money on building new roads—rather than working on public transportation and fixing up existing roads and bridges. The result of the indiscriminate spending? States missed out on potentially thousands of new jobs—and bridges, roads, and overpasses around the country are still crumbling. Meanwhile, the states that did put dollars toward public transportation were richly rewarded: Each dollar used on transit was 75 percent more effective at putting people to work than a dollar used for highway work.
The government meant to get the biggest bang for its buck, with “shovel-ready projects.” But building miles of new roads requires planning, land acquisition, and other lengthy steps that put fewer workers on the job immediately.
Mandel Ngan / Getty Images
The government, of course, meant to get the biggest bang for its buck. The stimulus bill forced states to spend their allocated cash quickly, which was intended to get them to fund maintenance needs—“shovel-ready projects”—that had already been identified. Building miles of new roads, on the other hand, requires planning, land acquisition, and other lengthy steps that put fewer workers on the job immediately.
Some states did that. Sue Minter, Vermont’s deputy transportation secretary, says a longstanding “fix-it-first” policy for infrastructure and bipartisan collaboration shaped Vermont’s decisions about how to use the funds. The state spent all of its highway money on system maintenance, with a small amount going to mass transit. (Minter, a Democrat, was a member of the state legislature at the time.) “This shot of money into our economy was very, very significant. It’s part of the reason we have a relatively low unemployment rate,” she says. Only 5.8 percent of Vermont residents are out of work, one of the nation’s lowest rates. State research shows that ARRA funding employed 11,000 people—a small number overall, but a significant one in a small state. Minter says the maintenance was important for keeping economic growth, particularly in tourism, strong.
Other states, however, took a different tack. Arkansas used 81 percent of its money for new projects and none on transit; it also has a higher unemployment rate than Vermont. And unlike other states near the bottom of the list, just 38 percent of its roads are in good condition, according to a report by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, a trade organization.
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Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
bench craft company reviews
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Many of the scenes broadcast from Egpyt in recent days have been joyful, but events took a horrific turn for CBS News correspondent Lara.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!
Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
bench craft company me
Lara Logan of CBS <b>News</b> Was Attacked and Sexually Assaulted in Egypt
Many of the scenes broadcast from Egpyt in recent days have been joyful, but events took a horrific turn for CBS News correspondent Lara.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!
Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
bench craft company reviews
Lara Logan of CBS <b>News</b> Was Attacked and Sexually Assaulted in Egypt
Many of the scenes broadcast from Egpyt in recent days have been joyful, but events took a horrific turn for CBS News correspondent Lara.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!
Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
bench craft company me
Lara Logan of CBS <b>News</b> Was Attacked and Sexually Assaulted in Egypt
Many of the scenes broadcast from Egpyt in recent days have been joyful, but events took a horrific turn for CBS News correspondent Lara.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!
Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
bench craft company me
Lara Logan of CBS <b>News</b> Was Attacked and Sexually Assaulted in Egypt
Many of the scenes broadcast from Egpyt in recent days have been joyful, but events took a horrific turn for CBS News correspondent Lara.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Happy Valentine's Day!
Valentine's Day is here. Talk about a recognizable brand! But what can this day of love teach you about improving your business by building better customer.
Weekly Search & Social <b>News</b>: 02/15/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Hello and welcome back to '7 Days of Search and Social'. Another week, another drama. While I've not looked historically to past years, one does have to wonder.
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