

Why Does Google Search Love Examiner.com? - jrmurad
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1946348,00.html

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qeorge
Article is a bit misleading, and fairly light on facts. Strikes me as Time
trying to "out" a competitor.

They're basically saying examiner.com is the Demand Media of online
newspapers. This sounds like a fair assessment, but there's no scandal here.
Just two divergent business models.

Side note: one thing in this article I find completely false is the statement
that examiner.com's articles are "neither advancing the story nor bringing any
insight."

Examiner.com has a flavor, to be sure. I don't like it, and I generally avoid
their articles, but calling them vanilla is incorrect.

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quant18
Interestingly enough, they (and helium.com, who have a vaguely similar
business model) were soft-banned from Wikipedia back in August [1] --- IPs and
new named accounts can't add links to them.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:XLinkBot/Reve...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:XLinkBot/RevertList&diff=prev&oldid=309943628)

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wgj
_Examiners take seminars on writing headlines, writing in the third person and
making full use of social media, all of which are Google manna._

Google favors sites written in third person?

~~~
jrmurad
I'd never heard this before but I can see why naming the subject helps over
using "I" or "we." Writing "Jason likes cake" on my website would tie me to
the "cake" keyword moreso than "I like cake", right?

~~~
wgj
I took it to indicate a bias against personal blogs, fiction, and other forms
more likely to be in first person. That's in contrast to sources like
Wikipedia, or virtually all news, which are in third person. Where it gets
weird would be informally written blogs that are still using the first and
second person.... or interviews perhaps?

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jsm386
Sounds like sour grapes...and it's a bit ironic, considering (spun back off)
AOL is going for this exact same strategy, even more so, with its Seed effort
[http://paidcontent.org/article/419-aols-armstrong-orders-
up-...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-aols-armstrong-orders-up-news-
thats-automated-and-advertorial/)

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100k
Good question. I always hit my back button as quickly as possible if I
inadvertently land on one of their pages.

~~~
seiji
I do the same thing with <http://osdir.com/> \-- it should really be delisted
from google. It's nothing but redundant messages available elsewhere plastered
with 30 ads that will severely lag or crash your browser.

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leviathant
I feel like Rupert Murdoch should be campaigning against sites like Examiner
and ContactMusic rather than Google News - they more closely fit the
description he paints of the parasitic organization that makes advertising
money off other people's content.

~~~
forensic
I think Murdoch wants publicity more than anything, and you don't get
publicity by attacking small things. The only reason Murdoch's google-attack
made the news is because google is so popular.

