

Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried - cwan
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

======
mark_l_watson
Good article. I get a lot of interesting information from following a small
number of technical blogs of people I know (usually just through years of
email contact) and trust. That is how I get valuable/interesting things to
read. (I also use twitter for this purpose.)

Redit (hint: strong customize the 'My Redit' lists you subscribe to narrow
things down to your particular interests) and Hacker News are also pretty good
if you stick to the first few pages of up-voted links.

re: search engines: one of my primary uses for web search is pasting in error
messages from server build errors, runtime errors, etc. Also, for quickly
looking up an API I can't quite remember. A very different process than using
search to find fun stuff to read.

~~~
cwan
A lot of interesting articles/links never get voted up so I do try to spend
some time on new submissions and vote.

I've given up trying to predict which of my links that I submit will get voted
up (I just post links that I find interesting). I notice the types of subject
matter that gets voted up can vary depending on the time of the day and
weekend/weekday content so you might lose a lot if you just stuck to the front
page for instance (though you do note sticking to the first few pages). That
said, we all only have so many hours in a day.

------
waterlesscloud
PageRank needs to get a lot smarter.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Spot on. I can't imagine that Google isn't already working on the solution to
this. Of course, when that solution means altering an algorithm as opposed to
arbitrarily targeting some of the higher profile sites like those mentioned
here, it will take time to resolve.

------
est
Baidu Baike and Baidu Zhidao is the similar content farm, but in Chinese:

<http://baike.baidu.com/robots.txt>

<http://zhidao.baidu.com/robots.txt>

