In a post appearing in Technologyreview.com, the CEO of Blekko.com a new search engine that just launched this week, Rich Skrenta, called out Google and Bing for indexing:
“Spam results from the likes of Demand Media and other “content farms, and made-for-adsense landing pages.”
I assume Skrenta would classify all “mini-sites” as spam as well.
Skrenta is quoted as saying that:
“”Blekko distinguishes itself from Google and Bing by excluding from its search listings spam results from the likes of Demand Media and other “content farms”, and made-for-adsense landing pages.”
“If you do a health-related search on Google, such as ‘cure for headaches,’ go and try 10 random health queries and tally how much spam you see there,” says Skrenta. “You’ll see nonsesnse domains.”
Not sure if Demand Media is going to be really happy having its sites classified as spam with all the writers they have engaged with ehow.com.
Defamation anyone? Spam is a four letter word…
First off, What a terrible domain name…I would probably go to Bleko, with 1 K first…looks like Im not the only one either.
Second, they’re also showing “Spam” sites as well in their search results. The CEO better understand his own product better before trashing others.
“The CEO better understand his own product better before trashing others.”
As Mike said it’s a new SE.
Trashing the Big Boys gets free publicity and garners attention.
All the bluster in the world won’t change the fact that Blekko is not a very good search engine (at this time).
I used a common search string to see where my football blog ranks. My blog was listed sixth. The fourth position shows a link to a website that no longer exists, and a baseball blog was listed at fifth.
He is totally correct. It is totally in the long-term best interest of search engines to de-index all mass-produces content and all affiliate arbitrage and ppc arbitrage. And it does mean de-indexing all DM, Epik, all domainer mass-development efforts, and sites like business.com, etc…
So…..who are feck are Blekko? Never heard of ’em.
Adsense and advertisements on sites are everywhere. You need to focus on the content of the page and if that content helps the person who clicked on the link, regardless of the ads that surround it. Content relevancy should be the proxy for the listing of sites on a search results page, not if they have ads on that page.
Of course sham ‘developers’ are quick to point out immense value of their bogus content. Really though, step outside this wee little community bubble and ask *anyone else* in the internet world about this; the prevailing theme is abject disgust over what the internet is becoming and what monetarily incentivised content is doing to the quality of information found on the web.
The entire internet is rapidly turning into a contrived-content landfill and to be sure, a movement is slowly but surely taking place to offer alternative search solutions. If G has anything resembling an Achilles heel, this is the closest thing to it.
At its core, much like direct keyword navigation, the profitability of trash content is really nothing more than a user-sophistication issue. There are still enough clueless users out there on the web- ones that cannot differentiate between a splog adfarm and a legitimately information-rich page- to keep the bounce rate just low enough and clicks just high enough to stay black… There are just enough ‘grannies getting their first computers’ to keep the game alive. The thing is, this is changing at light speed and in time, the users demanding higher quality content will no longer be limited to tech geeks and people who really ‘get’ the web. It will be everyone.
I was recently researching tax lien investing. For one particular keyword string, an Ezine article ranked very high.
Kinda like how a liar can spot another liar or a thief can spot another thief better than anyone else, I immediately recognized this as farmed, drivel content. The problem was, the information it conveyed was wholly incorrect, in spite of the narrative being written with an authoritative tone, in spite of being ranked shockingly high in serp. It was obviously written by someone who knew precisely *nothing* about the topic at hand but was getting paid to write an article, so they hit the expected research sources, formed a dirty, five minute opinion and stood themselves out there as a bonafide expert… and once they were done writing that article, they repeated that same intellectually bankrupt process with their next paid articles on Alpacas, Forex, Lawrence Kansas Home Mortgages, Medical Tourism in India or whatever else their employer paid them to write.
This is not a sustainable model for the web. G is in a crappy spot since their monetization schemes are the impetus that drive so much of this, yet it all goes against their larger philosophy about content quality… If a challenger ever arises to threaten their dominance, it will be by devising a better algo to filter out this crap and deliver cleaner information to John Q Netguy.
Google eventually will have to faceup to advertisers and real developers/publishers .
The crappiecookiecutterminisitecrappola deindexing started a few weeks back, the whinning is loud at other forums….
It’s was just a matter of time, same goes for crappie parking traffic.
This is a nightmare for DemandSpam, now Google will quietly but surely pay more attention to them.
As far as landing sites: Let’s be honest, they are spam and useless to users.
Maybe surfers love content farms ?
Microsoft learned a hard lesson. After 10 years of fighting against porn in its index, it now allows it. Lesson learned: users that surf for porn also surf for general info.
in the mean time Facebook has bought FB.com
what use will do of this domain?
– email service
– redirect to its .com
– short-URL
– search engine
– twitter-like site
– micro payments site
– other
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Sgt Blekko
OR
Sgt Bilko
http://www.google.com/search?q=sgt+bilko&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
LOL!
Domain spam as quoted by Blekko CEO is everywhere including Blekko. How do you stop the monster? Advertisers advertise through domains, AdSense and basically all other avenues that are open to receiving dollars, just like Blekko is. How does the saying go .. people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
“people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”
Thats my google talk status message for the day.Thanks steve !
Blokko. Let me try some typos first…
I don’t hate spam, if it hasn’t malware inside
about blekko… I’ve tried it, but, unfortunately, it’s too young compared with all other SE
e.g. I’ve searched the word ghostNASA (my space blog) but it has given me only 137 results vs. 14,600 results of Google
@Anon
This is the way of the world. Have you ever read an article in a newspaper, or seen a news report on TV that was about a topic you were well versed on? Without fail the report contains inaccuracies.
Also, if you go into a book store looking for a book on a certain topic, you need to look through various books until you find exactly what you’re looking for. The other books were written (usually) to turn a profit for its creator. Why should the internet be any different? Is there an unwritten rule saying that all content on the internet should be provided out of love, not for profit? The only reason we have television is as a vehicle for advertising, because that’s how it gets paid for. It’s not the reason it was created, but it is the reason that we still have it.
Skrenta is right of course but there is no stopping the juggernaught of G ads everybody, 90% of webmasters live off G-ads. Blekko is doomed to fail.
While in most cases the content on mini-sites and advanced parking pages is going to be similar if not the same as a lot of places, at least it’s content. Remember back when all parking was links links links? At least now pages are TRYING to offer SOMETHING to help visitors out, even if in a lot of cases the content falls flat or winds up being only loosely related to what the person is looking for. Then again, that happens a lot on search engines even with legitimate websites, and sometimes searching something different will bring up more targeted results to what you were looking for.
It’s obvious why Blekko is complaining – PR even if people disagree with him is what he needs. However, he’s ultimately going to fall into the same trap as Cuil…shoulda used a better domain than Blekko.com, Mr. Skrenta. To me it sounds like bleck.
Hi,
If I owned a search engine, I can included or excluded any website I want. (and would do so)
The first 3 I would ‘exclude’…would be the 3 SE’s mentioned in the title of this article….you’s is in the title
“Spam”… LOL…
Blekko…. use your “own spider bots”, and then index websites you feel live up to your standards.
If you want to “exclude” sites from the company’s mention… then do it.
Google & Bing can “index” any website they want or do not want….and in any order they want to. (which they do)
So stop using any kind of search result feed(s) from any of them.
Do your OWN WORK ~ And forget about what any other “SE” is doing.
____
BTW: Why do you not ask Google to remove about 60% of their “Blogspot” websites while your at it?
___
Peace!
Dan
@James
Well said James.
Many people think internet is a free medium to get information. I get comments asking if the article is peer reviewed and why the references are not in a certain format. If we want that kind of detailed information we must go to university and pay thousands of dollars per year. You can’t expect internet to give that depth of level of information for free.