Tired of Content Farms? There’s an Extension for That
Posted on 14. Feb, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey in Chrome, Chrome OS, News
Content farms are sites that basically create low quality content in the hopes that you will find them in Google and click on or view their ads. They are a major annoyance, but the reality is that companies like Demand Media make a killing from this, as evidenced by their recent IPO that valued them at $1.5 billion – that’s more than what the New York Times is worth.
If you need to better understand (and perhaps have a laugh) check out this content farm parody site.It’s funny, but as the web gets larger with more people searching for things, this has become a serious issue.
Google has heard the complaints, and has released a Chrome extension called Personal Blocklist. It will, at your choosing, block sites that you deem as spam so that they no longer appear in your searches. The extension will also help Google better identify spam by taking the information sent in by users and accounting it into its search algorithms.
I like the idea. Google already employs hundreds, if not thousands, of contractors whose job it is to identify “spammy” sites that should be weeded out of queries. But the problem with that is the sheer number of sites: the people performing this type of work have limited resources to determine whether a site’s specific content is “spammy” or not. They can probably tell webspam by design and other architectural features of a site such as ad placement, but they aren’t going to sit around reading the content of each site.
Google is essentially democratizing this process. It will be interesting to see how this affects sites like Demand Media, but the best quality search results should appear first, not the ones that have been specifically designed to trick Google into coming up first based on a set of words. Do you see a lot of webspam in your searches, and do you think this will help out?
via CNET, Official Google Blog
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How To Block Spammy Sites in Google Search Without an Extension | thechromesource - Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum
10. Mar, 2011
[...] Google announced their extension for Chrome called Personal Blocklist, there was some criticism that offering a browser-specific add-on for only one search solution was [...]