Andrew Pollack's Blog

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Do you now routinely ignore the top few search results?

By Andrew Pollack on 03/24/2006 at 05:35 PM EDT

Search Engine farmers is a name I've decided to give these sociopaths who create automated tools that suck in content from as many places as they can, generate link farms, and work every other trick possible so as to be the top pick in as many searches on the internet as possible. These site owners automatically aggregate content into pages which are virtually unusable by people but don't violate search engine anti-hacker rules because they do actually display the words on te page. As a result, these search farmers get you to click to their site so they can show an advertising impression to you. That nets them a few cents each time.

Its gotten so bad that today because I was searching for something pretty common nearly the entire first page of results were bogus.

Honestly, I now view the top few entries of results with as much suspicion as an email from someone I don't know.


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