As a searcher, no I am not grateful to content farms, "directories", and other pseudo-content. In fact I find it quite frustrating that searches for common maintenance problems, housekeeping, medical topics, etc., now turn up page after page of superficial, ad-ridden content. I have the sense that the actual act of finding information on the internet has become quite a bit harder since, say, 2004.
What do you think of sites like DMV.org that wrap 50 godawful state websites and non-websites with nationally uniform easy to navigate content, plus ads mixed in?
It adds a lot of value to me, and Google rewards with huber page rank than government websites, which one assumes get a huge authoritativeness bonus from Google.
A lit of folks get indignant that someone is "just" exposing true information for money. That is 99% of what Google does and why everyone loves them. If you cut the money out, the ride stops. Organized information is more valuable and more costly than scattered hidden information.
Here's the question... would you pay for better information? Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.
> Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.
We already have one of those: it's called the World Wide Web.
If only bottom-feeders could stop getting in the way of navigating it, we could get back to answering useful questions with a quick Web search the way we used to.
People used to buy books and magazines or go to the library.
The great thing about the internet was that it replaced the hassle and expense of doing that. It works pretty well even with the nearly-content-free sites clogging up the system.
Incidentally, for Q&A, IBM might have something that will beat google search:
