

Google's War on Nonsense - dirtyaura
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/googles-war-on-nonsense/?src=tptw

======
Alex3917
Fairly ironic considering this entire article was basically rewritten in
twenty minutes from two or three original blog posts, so that the NY Times
could run ads against their own version. This entire article adds exactly
nothing to the originals.

And what's more, whenever I check my RSS feed from the NYT I regularly see
entries like this:

>The 6th Floor: Sentence of the Week

"Five diverse candidates this week."

It seems like the NYT is just trying to distract Google from the fact that 90%
of their own content is not much better than the content farmed stuff they're
criticizing.

~~~
nhebb
... especially when you consider that the New York Times owns about.com.

~~~
AlisdairO
in fairness, I regularly find information that's actually useful to me on
about.com. Not the highest quality site, but I certainly wouldn't rank it with
the demand medias of this world.

~~~
nhebb
In fairness, you are right. I've found a few helpful pages on about.com.
_(I've found a lot more unhelpful ones, though.)_ And even Demand Media has
shining moments. Thanks to eHow, I was able to fix a jammed disposal last
month.

------
bborud
A friend of mine got it into his head that there was money to be made from
setting up a system to generate bullshit sites in the hopes of attracting
users and creating "communities". In fact, he had a couple of these bullshit
sites up and was generating a surprising amount of income from them. Of
course, he insisted that they were not bullshit sites and that his intent was
to turn the promising ones into "real" sites.

I declined to take part in the venture because I felt this was deeply wrong. I
also predicted that Google would do their best to stomp out these sites
despite selling ads on them (to stop selling ads on them first they have to
identify them as bullshit) and that his business might evaporate overnight.
And rightly so.

I hope he didn't invest too much of his own money in it. Or better yet, that
he scrapped the idea altogether.

Because it is a really terrible idea.

------
wslh
What's ironic with this nonsense is that it helps a lot to make progress in
the NLP field.

I see it like the security field where attacks and defense push to move
forward. The difference is that Google offers "security through obscurity"
because we don't know how their bunch of algorithms works.

~~~
mrspeaker
I guess it'll be win-win when the content farms can automatically generate
"interesting" content.

~~~
etruong42
Agreed. <http://xkcd.com/810/>

------
api
This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is
presently being paid to do useless work?

~~~
SandB0x
You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary
is here: [http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-
earth.ht...](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.html)
and the approximate origins are here:
[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/the-
speed-of-labor-market-adjustment.html)

"I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers
simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."

~~~
api
A solution might be forthcoming: peak oil. Put them to work making biofuels at
a large scale.

~~~
eftpotrm
I don't believe that's a very manpower-intensive production system though,
unless we're going for the Soylent Green option...

~~~
eftpotrm
Though, I should say, that masks another contingency with possibly the same
effect.

We have an economy which is predicated on cheap energy. As such it's
frequently cheaper to produce goods by comparitively inefficient automated
processes due to the reduction in manpower required, or to produce goods at
distance from their end user as the reduction of labour costs from a remote
supplier outweights the transportation costs.

It seems plausible that an energy scarce world could reverse the economics of
both situations. It would have enough other consequences that I'm not at all
suggesting it as some sort of worker's utopia, but greater employment may be
an interesting side-effect.

------
ez77
'The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it
seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all
online information.'

I doubt any decent translation would turn a random Wikipedia article into
vacuous prose. The style may generally be cold, maybe 'soulless'
(encyclopedic?), but more often than not there's a good amount of information
and, more importantly, relevant sources.

~~~
tokenadult
_more often than not there's a good amount of information and, more
importantly, relevant sources_

Relevant sources "more often than not" on Wikipedia? As a Wikipedian, I have
to disagree, based on my personal knowledge of what the stream of newly
submitted articles looks like, what the articles identified for Guild of Copy
Editors attention look like, and what long-standing articles on my watch list
look like. I confess that I don't have a published source to back up my
statement (or refute yours). Presumably, there is some legitimate ground for
debate on what is a "relevant" source for a particular article. I do note that
the Wikimedia Foundation itself thinks more work still needs to be done on
improving article quality.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Improve_Content_Quality)

One other thing I notice is how little uptake there is from source lists
posted in userspace

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

into the related articles. Most editor discussions I see on a variety of
article talk pages revolve around "I don't believe this," or "You miswrote
this" much more than "What's a relevant source about this?" Perhaps you read
mostly articles about different subjects from the articles I read on
Wikipedia, and I'd love to hear about examples of articles with good sourcing
in general.

~~~
ez77
Thanks for your reply. I guess I was thinking of low-controversy articles such
as <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System> , but given your
background I'm sure your perception is closer to reality than mine.

------
drblast
Last week I was reading an article about producing random text that was
disturbingly close to human-produced by analyzing word frequency of massive
amounts of data.

It seems that it would be cheaper to produce articles this way instead of
hiring low-wage workers to do it.

Hmmmm...I guess there's some money in there for someone who'd stoop to that.

------
jarin
I've got a buddy who is a paid writer for AOL/HuffPost, and he writes great,
originally researched articles. I was really sad to see recently through his
author feed that he's now also churning out their signature content-less
keyword articles and brief summaries that link to full blog posts on other
sites. At least they're uncredited, but sad to see a good writer sell out like
that.

------
kristianp
I think the author of this article misunderstands the panda update. It was
intended to demote content farms, which have mostly automated content.

The author is talking about "people working like robots", which is not the
same thing at all.

------
topherjaynes
Aftering reading, Googled "Rick Fox's mustache' and got the article in
questions as the #1 result, but isn't the gist of the article that project
panda fixed this?

~~~
whacker
If many people are linking/searching for this contrived example, then its
probably distorting the 'quality' of the article.

I did not search it myself to deny them the google juice.

------
zig
I stopped when she "grew confused" by the weird articles. Perhaps she
shouldn't be viewing webpages at all. Most people would recognize this
instantly as nonsense, click the back button, and select another search
result.

~~~
ThomPete
You clearly haven't taken the average user into consideration.

The users who got confused when by accident RRW ranked higher than Facebook
because of an article with the word facebook and login.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php)

But even for us "in the know"

Try and google for photoshop tutorials and you will have to wade through
endless of these fake pages.

It is a real problem.

~~~
p4bl0
Whoa. I knew some people sadly use Google even when they know the url, but
this is just... wtf?!

No wonder why there's so many phishing spams, people so uneducated for web
usage must get owned all the time... Maybe it's time for primary school to
teach children basics about how to use a computer a bit more safely. The
problem with this is that every time I saw something like it, it was actually
advertisement for Microsoft products dispensed by teachers who didn't knew
what a url is (and they're not to blame for that).

~~~
SandB0x
I know several highly educated people who type "google" into the Google search
box in Firefox to get to Google.

You and I are almost certainly doing equally bizarre and convoluted things in
other areas of our lives.

~~~
adolph
Google search bar is truly the command line of the Internet.

~~~
jeffool
I don't think I ever really understood how "odd" I must seem to some people
when using YubNub...

~~~
adolph
Thats pretty cool looking:

<http://yubnub.org/>

~~~
jeffool
I suppose I could've explained it... It's ideal for keyboard-heavy users.

Instead of typing a search term into the search box and Ctrl+Arrow-ing to the
search engine I want to use, with YubNub (in Firefox and Chrome, maybe IE?)
you type in a command for what you want to do.

"g FDR" does a Google search of "FDR". b Bing, y Yahoo, yt YouTube, CNN, ESPN,
IMDB, and on and on.

There's even some slightly stronger commands: "tr Chi Eng 晚安" uses Google
Translate from Chinese to English, telling me "晚安" means "good night".

Yeah, I mostly use the "g" and "yt" commands, but I love the flexibility
without having to arrange search engines. I just remember a few
letters/commands. For a long time I'd resorted to typing "site:imdb.com" as my
first search term into a Google search box. No more.

Also, you can define your own shortcuts! On a whim, I pointed XBLA to the Xbox
Live marketplace at Xbox.com, and it works wonderfully. So now I can just type
"xbla Trenched" and get to the page so I can buy the game with a click.

A few of their "Golden Egg" commands:
<http://yubnub.org/kernel/golden_eggs?args=>

~~~
p4bl0
As sesqu said, this features is built into firefox. I only have a window-wide
url bar on my firefox and extensively use these "keyworded" bookmarks.

So in my url bar I can "g foo" to search "foo" using google, "wp foo" for
wikipedia fr, "wpe foo" for wikipedia english, "imdb foo" for imdb, "yt foo"
for youtube, "dm foo" for dailymotion, "gdv foo" to load the document which
url is "foo" into google docs viewer, "tw" take me to twitter, "fb" to
facebook, "hn" to Hacker News, "mail" to gmail, "reader" to google reader,
"in" to linked in... I don't have to all list in my head, it's mostly a finger
habits now.

What is really cool since firefox has the awesomebar is that it is aware of
this and display the actual url so when i type "imdb foo bar" i see
"[http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=foo+bar](http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=foo+bar)
at the top of the proposed url.

This is really handy for people like me who mostly use their keyboard: this
powerful firefox feature is just a ctrl+L away when I'm already in firefox
:-).

