Google has in many ways the best of intentions and often does right by its users. I value their leadership in so many respects. But their recent algorithm change has gotten some folks (myself included, and I believe Google themselves) into some murky waters. While the precept of increasing quality should be a mandate for any self-respecting search engine, I believe the objective of picking winners and losers in terms of accuracy seems a little overreaching. Will Google be the editor and reviewer of accuracy from now on? We accept and appreciate that Google gives us search results that provide the most relevant links to what users are looking for. They use a combination of algorithms and statistical tools to extrapolate what the user wants. That is fine and good and what we love about them.
With this new “Farmer Update”, they seem to think that what users want is for someone else (namely Google) to tell them what is authoritative information. If we are to live up to the premise of net neutrality and democratization, Google as the leader in the search space, cannot play favorites and pick winners. Effectively this devalues user-generated content and places greater value to authoritative and editorialized content. Their choice to pick eHow.com over Answerbag.com (both Demand Media sites) shows that they are more concerned about giving users “authoritative” information than user generated information – and yes, UGC is prone to be wrong and sometimes low quality. But, is that what, we as search consumers, want?
I understand that I am biased – I manage a Q&A site (askmehelpdesk.com) that has all user generated content (UGC) and has and will continue to occasionally fail in terms of content quality. But does our site helps a lot of users in a variety of topics (plumbing, relationships, taxes, cars & trucks, etc.). Our experts and active members care about their fellow members and take the time and effort to give the best answer possible. But yes, once in a while (I estimate < 20%) we have a "low quality" question with a "low quality" answer. Heck - the site is a community site and some of the community members don't take the time to spell or grammar check. In addition, there is a opinion and conjecture. But that's what we do - we are not trying to be the encyclopedia. And Google just dinged us in a bad way. We think its unfair because we do not engage in plagiarism or any manner of content farming. So I have to believe that our primary sin is enabling and fostering user content and trying to make money from Adsense. This is fundamentally wrong and unfair to our community.
If you read Google’s Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, they clearly want us, the search user, to defer to Google about what constitute content authority. This is definitely a trend that I believe is wrong and has huge impacts on our society and its use of the Internet. See for yourselves (excerpted from http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1)
Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?
Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”
Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.
Since when does Google become a magazine publisher or the design reviewer? I understand that market pressures will dictate whether users really want this or do not. And I think Google themselves will realize that they have gone a little too far on this one. But in the meantime, the collateral damage is disconcerting.
And more importantly, I sincerely want Google to succeed! I believe they do a darn good job of search and I will continue to use them despite my belief that this particular change was wrong.
It simply boils down to the belief that no company the size of Google should have such unassailable control of content on the Internet. Google provides an essential service to people and needs to behave in such a manner. It is akin to saying that the government will stop welfare programs overnight because there is a problem with the welfare program.
So, how do I think Google could have done better? Do this incrementally – slowly providing a managed and safe system to transition to this new and improved way. I expect such a dramatic change to be done over the course of weeks – not overnight. Furthermore, I would ask Google to question Singhal and Cutts’s assumption that Google should be in the content editing business. I understand that there is an implicit editorializing that is necessary when determining which results to present and in which order. However, that form of editorializing was based on relevancy – not content quality – a very different metric. Relevancy can be determined by algorithms, but quality needs to be determined by the users. If we as users continue to offload our ability to judge quality, that’s a problem we as individual Internet consumers must live with.
And on behalf of fellow Q&A sites, communities of UGC content and other self-admittedly shallow (but meaningful) content sites, I implore Google to do a better job and get itself out of the correctness game!!
