Like most of you, searches via Google or Bing are key to a functional web. I’ve been noticing more and more that I’m having to go deeper into search results now to find links of value than was once required, especially when I’m trying to find objective information on products. Monetizers are getting smarter about search engine optimization and big money is being invested in it. Too often, early pages are a thicket of commercial exhortations and “content farm” garbage – pages designed to provide just enough content to rise in the search ranks but really are thinly disguised spam. An entrepreneur turned academic, Vivek Wadhwa [@vwadhwa], took this on in a TechCrunch post early this month:
… But it turns out that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search. …
Since then he’s written more about this elsewhere and it started quite a conversation in the blogosphere and tweetosphere. On Tuesday, Feb. 1, this will be the subject of a conference that will be streamed live on BigThink.com from 10a-2p Pacific Time. Wadhwa will be moderating a roundtable including reps from Google, Bing, and Blekko. --Dennis
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