I have heard about search engine spam before and sort of discounted it - but you know, if you search on something that's not a technical topic or something equally specific like a band name, that is, you're searching on a general topic that is of interest to the mundanes, then there really is a whole lot of spam on Google.
My case from this week was that I wanted plans for a bookcase. I searched, therefore, on "build a bookcase". There was exactly one useful link on Google's front page (a Popular Mechanics link), and the rest were regurgitated spam that I could improve on with a Markov chain algorithm.
I've read that as long as people click on ads, Google has no motivation to clean up spam, but surely this can't be the best even for Google?
That's strange. My Google results page for "build a bookcase" shows 8 high quality tutorials on how to build bookcases, besides two pretty decent video-tutorials.
I concur. I got to the second page before I found anything other than a first class result (incidently it was how to build a bookcase in 5 minutes which seems to be a dubious proposition at best). Now if you looking for information on something you actually want to buy then yes, google's results are indeed a sea of spam.
Another interesting example is trying to look for a hotel. Try to search for the one you know - there's ~0 chance that their actual page will appear on the front page. Only resellers, spam and car renting...
Google is all about search quality, so they have a huge motivation to fight spam. It's getting worse now because the mail spam is mostly a solved problem[1] and the web has became the new battlefront.
[1] I haven't got a single spam in my Gmail inbox for ages, and other spam filters are pretty good as well.
My case from this week was that I wanted plans for a bookcase. I searched, therefore, on "build a bookcase". There was exactly one useful link on Google's front page (a Popular Mechanics link), and the rest were regurgitated spam that I could improve on with a Markov chain algorithm.
I've read that as long as people click on ads, Google has no motivation to clean up spam, but surely this can't be the best even for Google?