How Google is Creating a Web of Spam

Recently I read a post called “Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google” over on TechCrunch. In the post, Vivek Wadhwa describes how he tried to have his UC Berkeley students use Google to research selected company founders and how they failed miserably.

“It turns out,” Wadha writes, “that you can’t easily do such searches in Google any more. Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money.” He then describes how they ended up using an alternative search engine called Blekko to perform the assignment.

But one of his main points was how the way Google has set up advertising on the Web has created a market for spam web sites:

The problem is that content on the internet is growing exponentially and the vast majority of this content is spam. This is created by unscrupulous companies that know how to manipulate Google’s page-ranking systems to get their websites listed at the top of your search results. When you visit these sites, they take you to the websites of other companies that want to sell you their goods. (The spammers get paid for every click.)

I’ve been aware of this firsthand. There are people getting rich out there by creating spam web sites that exist only to send folks off to another web site and therefore have no real utility. The essential problem is that Google itself has absolutely no motivation to change this, as they get a cut of every click and for them it would be like killing the Golden Goose to put a stop to this nonsense.

So what we’re left with is, as Wadhwa points out, the need for a new and better Google. It may or not be Blekko, but it will likely be something like Blekko that enables searching of selected areas of the web — not every single SEO-enhanced spam site. I, for one, will welcome my new search overlord.