Too true. Any business model that depends on the whims of another company to make money—such as, in this case, a search engine with a proprietary algorithm and the financial and technical resources to do anything necessary to uphold its reputation for efficiency and user-friendliness—is probably not a good idea. Or, rather, it’s an okay idea for a little while, but as soon as Google discovers that something is gumming up the machine, that’s the end of that business model.
Parenthetically, when I started writing this post I was trying to remember the name of that little bird that rides on top of the rhinocerous. It turned out to not be the best metaphor to use, because, as I remembered, the rhino and the tickbird have a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship. A more fitting metaphor for spammers might be a tapeworm, or some kind of viral infection. In any case, I mention it just to point out that when I typed in “bird on rhinocerous,” Google led me to this truly illuminating page on Answers.com:
I've been reading the press comments on Google search spam. Even Paul Krugman has weighed in. I have yet to find one story that indicated that the "reporter" had made so much as an outgoing phone call to gather information. Other than one article in Fortune by Seith Weintraub, the "analysis" consists of regurgitating press releases.
The blog post above does not improve on this standard.
#1 Posted by John Nagle, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 01:33 PM
..I did the same search, and the answers.com (fourth best result) answer was actually the *only one* on the first page of SERPS that identified the bird as a "Tick Bird" -- which was the bird you were thinking of.
With that information, you could then look up "Tick Bird" on wikipedia and get a lot more information.
So ... to my mind, the answers.com snippet actually provided value, by creating a link between your search query and the information you were seeking. It is actually the only result on the first page that gets you closer to the answer you were looking for.
#2 Posted by Andrew Boer, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 03:46 PM
My husband runs a site that helps teach people how to convert xml to pdf, etc. He says that he gets a lot of spam comments, but ever since he hired a moderator things have gotten better. Google would need about a billion moderators to help their problem.
#3 Posted by Lyla Burns, CJR on Tue 29 May 2012 at 11:31 AM