Google's War on Nonsense

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/googles-war-on-nonsense/?src=tptw

by dirtyaura • 15 years ago

157 70 15 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

zig• 15 years ago

I stopped when she "grew confused" by the weird articles. Perhaps she shouldn't be viewing webpages at all. Most people would recognize this instantly as nonsense, click the back button, and select another search result.

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

You clearly haven't taken the average user into consideration.

The users who got confused when by accident RRW ranked higher than Facebook because of an article with the word facebook and login.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...

But even for us "in the know"

Try and google for photoshop tutorials and you will have to wade through endless of these fake pages.

It is a real problem.

p4bl02• 15 years ago

Whoa. I knew some people sadly use Google even when they know the url, but this is just... wtf?!

No wonder why there's so many phishing spams, people so uneducated for web usage must get owned all the time... Maybe it's time for primary school to teach children basics about how to use a computer a bit more safely. The problem with this is that every time I saw something like it, it was actually advertisement for Microsoft products dispensed by teachers who didn't knew what a url is (and they're not to blame for that).

minikomi• 15 years ago

Design related spam seems to be an area where a stack exchange like site could step in and really take off.. lists of lists of lists of blogs of my favorite 50 photoshop brushes..

chunky1994• 15 years ago

I agree, there's a lot of tiring unrelated stuff on the internet, the only way to avoid it, sadly, is to wade through it, till you find what you're looking for.

api4• 15 years ago

This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

most of this is computer generated no?

I mean look for popular headlines, terms etc construct nonsense pages and you will have a good chance of getting up there.

Joakal2• 15 years ago

Useless is subjective. If they are being paid, then it's not considered useless work is it?

staticshock• 15 years ago

No, read the linked AOL content farmer testimonial (http://thefastertimes.com/news/2011/06/16/aol-hell-an-aol-co...). He was one of many people hired by AOL to write this stuff by hand, at night, for $28k.

nickolai• 15 years ago

Do you define the usefulness of a piece of work as "fulfills a percieved need for the individual paying for it" or as "brings added value to our society"?

In the former case - every employee is doing useful work. The latter definition is way more restrictive.

api4• 15 years ago

The latter. Useful means that it provides value that somehow improves the human condition. Everything from food to fuel to art to architecture is that. Random junk on the net is not.

A central fallacy of present-day economics is the assumption that all economic activity is of equal value. GDP is a good example: A million dollars spent on healthcare increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on war increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on rubber dog crap increases GDP by a million. But these transactions are not of equal value.

I personally think that economic central planners and GDP growth targets are a major underlying cause of all this useless make-work. I call it the gerbil wheel economy.

Run, gerbil, run! Gotta make the opaque meaningless numbers bigger!

You can see it very clearly in very centrally planned economies that worship GDP growth, like China. They have entire abandoned cities-- things built for nobody, just to make opaque numbers bigger.

SandB0x2• 15 years ago

You might want to read about the Zero Marginal Product Hypothesis. The summary is here: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/dregs-of-earth.ht... and the approximate origins are here: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07...

"I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."

api4• 15 years ago

A solution might be forthcoming: peak oil. Put them to work making biofuels at a large scale.

lotharbot• 15 years ago

A large number of workers with Zero Marginal Product can be a sign of an economy in transition -- that is, a sign that people are employed in positions where they may have been productive in the past, but changes in the overall environment have rendered them obsolete.

This does not mean they're incapable of doing valuable work. It just means they haven't yet finished the transition from whatever no-value-added position they were in to a value-added position.

jellicle• 15 years ago

It's not useless; it's mostly actively harmful. It has a negative worth, not zero worth.

kds• 15 years ago

In my humble opinion the Global Situation roughly is:

-> 80 % Survival mode, Struggling to meet ends (The so-called 3rd World, mostly)

-> 15 % Semi-Ok, Hired hands in private and governmental institutions of various size (in-debted wage slaves, mostly)

-> 5 % Ok, successful business owners, top managers, political leaders, rich and super-rich (various business sizes, amounts, market caps, etc... imagine any metric indicating financial and social success)

If this picture is mostly right => Perhaps, the really useless work isn't something which is rightly measured as the global number of humans busy with it.

bborud2• 15 years ago

I believe your estimates are overly optimistic. Then again, if you look at just the US, there is a huge gap between how people think wealth is distributed and reality.

The distribution is only going to get worse. I don't see the 0.1% at the top suddenly growing altruistic -- nor do I think any sort of political disruption can change this tendency in the long term. Such disruptions now seem to, more often than not, result in more assets being secured by those of means.

Whatever illusions of a democratic and fair society the 1900s instilled in us are just that: illusions. I predict that within my lifetime western society will indeed continue a trend towards the sci-fi predicions of the privately owned corporate state. To a large degree, this is already reality.

ez772• 15 years ago

'The insultingly vacuous and frankly bizarre prose of the content farms — it seems ripped from Wikipedia and translated from the Romanian — cheapens all online information.'

I doubt any decent translation would turn a random Wikipedia article into vacuous prose. The style may generally be cold, maybe 'soulless' (encyclopedic?), but more often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources.

Joakal2• 15 years ago

I think it was referring to copying content from wikipedia, translating it into a different language and then back into English. Probably one of the reasons for google to reduce the manipulation by taking down the translate API.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

more often than not there's a good amount of information and, more importantly, relevant sources

Relevant sources "more often than not" on Wikipedia? As a Wikipedian, I have to disagree, based on my personal knowledge of what the stream of newly submitted articles looks like, what the articles identified for Guild of Copy Editors attention look like, and what long-standing articles on my watch list look like. I confess that I don't have a published source to back up my statement (or refute yours). Presumably, there is some legitimate ground for debate on what is a "relevant" source for a particular article. I do note that the Wikimedia Foundation itself thinks more work still needs to be done on improving article quality.

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...

One other thing I notice is how little uptake there is from source lists posted in userspace

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

into the related articles. Most editor discussions I see on a variety of article talk pages revolve around "I don't believe this," or "You miswrote this" much more than "What's a relevant source about this?" Perhaps you read mostly articles about different subjects from the articles I read on Wikipedia, and I'd love to hear about examples of articles with good sourcing in general.

ez772• 15 years ago

Thanks for your reply. I guess I was thinking of low-controversy articles such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System , but given your background I'm sure your perception is closer to reality than mine.

skybrian• 15 years ago

More work always needs to be done, but you might be getting a skewed view of things by looking at problem articles. What happens if you pick a random sample of articles weighted by how many page views they get? That's closer to what the average reader sees.

wslh• 15 years ago

What's ironic with this nonsense is that it helps a lot to make progress in the NLP field.

I see it like the security field where attacks and defense push to move forward. The difference is that Google offers "security through obscurity" because we don't know how their bunch of algorithms works.

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

I guess it'll be win-win when the content farms can automatically generate "interesting" content.

sea6ear• 15 years ago

Somewhat related :-)

xkcd: http://xkcd.com/810/

etruong42• 15 years ago

Agreed. http://xkcd.com/810/

topherjaynes• 15 years ago

Aftering reading, Googled "Rick Fox's mustache' and got the article in questions as the #1 result, but isn't the gist of the article that project panda fixed this?

whacker• 15 years ago

If many people are linking/searching for this contrived example, then its probably distorting the 'quality' of the article.

I did not search it myself to deny them the google juice.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

Fairly ironic considering this entire article was basically rewritten in twenty minutes from two or three original blog posts, so that the NY Times could run ads against their own version. This entire article adds exactly nothing to the originals.

And what's more, whenever I check my RSS feed from the NYT I regularly see entries like this:

>The 6th Floor: Sentence of the Week

"Five diverse candidates this week."

It seems like the NYT is just trying to distract Google from the fact that 90% of their own content is not much better than the content farmed stuff they're criticizing.

nhebb2• 15 years ago

... especially when you consider that the New York Times owns about.com.

AlisdairO3• 15 years ago

in fairness, I regularly find information that's actually useful to me on about.com. Not the highest quality site, but I certainly wouldn't rank it with the demand medias of this world.

paganel• 15 years ago

> New York Times owns about.com.

Wait, what?! Fuck, I hate that website. I was once searching for something like "Chernobyl cancer statistics" or something similar and, sure enough, about.com was there in the top 10 for that search. And that was after update Panda. At this point I've started to give up, I'm just adding "wiki" in almost all of my searches, hoping that Wikipedia has something smart/accurate to say about the subject I'm interested in.

spacemanaki• 15 years ago

I don't think that's really fair. It's true that the NYT website is in the same fundamental business as content farms, that is using content to attract pageviews (forgetting the pay wall for a minute), but much more than 10% of the NYT is very high quality, compared to content farms. Sure, there's fluffy stuff printed every day, but there's also the kind of journalism and writing that you can't buy at .9c/word.

In this case, just look at the links to other Opinionator blogs on the right hand side of the linked article, for examples of stuff you won't find in any content farm.

  * a five parts series on early computer scientists
  * a post about a composer and musician growing up
  * Stephen Strogatz's long (and excellent) series on math aimed at non-math people
  * something about philosophy and rational choice that  was dense enough that I couldn't skim quickly enough to summarize

Plus, I don't see ads on any of these pages. Are other people being served ads on the original article?

edited for formatting

edited again: in another browser, I see that this page does indeed have ads, so I was wrong about that.

scott_s2• 15 years ago

I find your characterization inaccurate. What this author did was tie together a blog post from a week ago with Google's recent algorithm changes. The piece she quoted was an example of the sort of thing Google is trying to combat. What she adds is this connection. Readers of HN probably don't need these dots connected for us. But most readers of the NY Times probably do, since most of them do not have the experience and understanding of the web that most HN readers do. This is the sort of thing newspapers have done for as long as they've been around.

I find your claim that 90% of the content on the NY Times is "not much better than the content farmed stuff" absurd. Most of the writing on the NY Times has a clear voice and purpose, and much of it is original.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

"I find your claim that 90% of the content on the NY Times is 'not much better than the content farmed stuff' absurd. Most of the writing on the NY Times has a clear voice and purpose, and much of it is original."

Even their so-called original writing often isn't original at all. Just look at their article on Choquequirao from this week, which took up half of the travel section:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/travel/in-peru-machu-pi...

Seem at all familiar? Probably because it's practically a word-for-word rewrite of this article from 2007, with a couple paragraphs from various other articles thrown in for good measure:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/travel/03inca.html

drblast• 15 years ago

Last week I was reading an article about producing random text that was disturbingly close to human-produced by analyzing word frequency of massive amounts of data.

It seems that it would be cheaper to produce articles this way instead of hiring low-wage workers to do it.

Hmmmm...I guess there's some money in there for someone who'd stoop to that.

bborud2• 15 years ago

A friend of mine got it into his head that there was money to be made from setting up a system to generate bullshit sites in the hopes of attracting users and creating "communities". In fact, he had a couple of these bullshit sites up and was generating a surprising amount of income from them. Of course, he insisted that they were not bullshit sites and that his intent was to turn the promising ones into "real" sites.

I declined to take part in the venture because I felt this was deeply wrong. I also predicted that Google would do their best to stomp out these sites despite selling ads on them (to stop selling ads on them first they have to identify them as bullshit) and that his business might evaporate overnight. And rightly so.

I hope he didn't invest too much of his own money in it. Or better yet, that he scrapped the idea altogether.

Because it is a really terrible idea.

jarin2• 15 years ago

I've got a buddy who is a paid writer for AOL/HuffPost, and he writes great, originally researched articles. I was really sad to see recently through his author feed that he's now also churning out their signature content-less keyword articles and brief summaries that link to full blog posts on other sites. At least they're uncredited, but sad to see a good writer sell out like that.

kristianp• 15 years ago

I think the author of this article misunderstands the panda update. It was intended to demote content farms, which have mostly automated content.

The author is talking about "people working like robots", which is not the same thing at all.

Google's War on Nonsense

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