Search Startup Bans Content Farms, But is That What People Really Want?

Large quantities of low quality content, of marginal relevance, intended to draw visitors through search, but drive them to click through ads to other sites – that’s what’s called a content farm. The voices of critics of Google are getting louder with allegations that the world’s leading search engine has been thoroughly gamed and is now drowning in content farmed links. Content farm is a very subjective designation, though.

Search startup Blekko is betting that web users want to search without seeing results from companies that are pumping out low-quality content just for the ad revenue. But is one person’s low quality content another person’s more-accessible reading material? Today Blekko released a list of the top 20 domains that its users have clicked the “SPAM” button on in their search results. Content from those sites will never show up in a Blekko search again, the company says. What do you think of this list?

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“These sites are the worst spam publishers on the Web according to our users,” said Rich Skrenta, CEO of Blekko. “They are literally responsible for millions of pages on the Web that our users say are just not helpful and they’d prefer they were banned permanently. So we’re going to do that for them.”

The list is:
ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com

Want to see what search results from those domains look like? You can’t do it using Blekko anymore, but here’s a Google Custom Search Engine that searches inside just those domains alone.

Are These Spam Domains? Maybe Not

A lot of these domains are pretty obnoxious, but that’s just my opinion. Other peoples’ opinions are different. People complain about Demand Media’s eHow, for example, but the site also has one of the most popular free iPhone apps in the iTunes store. The content is directly useful, highly readable and easy to navigate.

In a semi-literate, post-functional world, people need basic instructions on everyday matters.

Picture the dystopia in the movie Back to the Future II, where Biff ends up a powerful media mogul and the world is awash in insipid, screeching, 24-hour infomercials. That’s kind of where we live, folks, and our brains have turned a little softer than some of us might like as a result.

Where else are you going to learn about basic things in this world? On Wikipedia? Have you read a Wikipedia entry lately? They trend wonky, over-detailed from the top and according to a New York Times report yesterday, written almost entirely by men.

The content on the domains above may seem like spam to the egg-headed geniuses behind Blekko, and the highly discerning early customers of that site, but I don’t think they always look like spam to the rest of the people on the web.

Fixya is another domain that’s on that list that I guarantee loads of everyday people are thankful for, not calling for banishment of. The site is littered with advertisements and poor writing. News flash: so is the rest of the world. That might offend the sensibilities of enough sophisticated Blekko users to click that Spam button on the Blekko site, but we’ll see who wins long-term – Blekko or the content farms.

I use Blekko every day. But I don’t use it for “spam control.” The determination of whether something is spam or not is really about context. I use Blekko for other types of context filtering. The ability to set up custom lists of domains not to exclude, but to limit a search to, is what’s most useful for me about Blekko.

I use the site to limit my searches and see what tech bloggers have written about a subject, or what tech industry analysts have, or bloggers who cover developments in the Middle East, or venture capitalists.

I understand that most people don’t want to perform searches limited to contexts as sophisticated as that, perhaps. But those same masses of users who don’t want to do anything too sophisticated are also likely to want some easy-to-read tutorial content like what you find on eHow. Is Blekko intending to serve just people who are interested in creating their own topical collections, or are they aimed at mainstream users? Do mainstream users really dislike these sites that Blekko is now banishing? I’m not so sure they do.

Banishing “content farms” may make sense in the minds of the people behind Blekko, but I’m not sure it’s the best idea for everyone.

Discuss