Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal had a funny piece yesterday about the “content mills” that are, uh, repurposing — read, pirating (or, in the case of Wikipedia and the like, reusing what’s free) — other people’s writing, in order to create pages that can be festooned with Google text ads and turned into cash.
There are different shades of gray on this spectrum. Some companies are building honest businesses by paying all comers small sums for articles that they know, in advance, will generate a certain level of Google-word money. Mesothelioma, anyone? (This rare form of asbestos-caused cancer has long been one of the best-paying Google words, because lawyers who represent asbestos victims are willing to pay big for leads.) Other shyster-entrepreneurs are simply paying writers to massage other people’s words just enough to pretend that the work is original, then reposting it. Gomes hooked up with someone from the latter group, and his account of conscientiously trying to deliver actual original copy to a patron who couldn’t care less makes a diverting farce.
Gomes concludes that the real villain here is Google itself: He blames the search engine for inspiring a flood of bogus content.
In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it. Which is what search engines are causing to happen to much of the world’s “information.” Legitimate information, like articles from the WHO, risks being crowded out by junky, spammy imitations. |
But Google the search engine is not the culprit; Google the ad machine is. The shysters wouldn’t be cranking out the HTML if it weren’t for AdSense, the Google text ads that publishers can plaster over their pseudocontent. Though AdWords — the keyword-based text ads that appear on Google’s own search results — are subject to a limited amount of gaming and manipulation (that Google is always trying to defeat or limit), the level of crap surrounding AdSense is far greater.
So blame Google — it deserves some. But keep the focus clear: A terrific search engine alone doesn’t make people publish acres of garbage.But put a few dollars in play and some “content providers” will do the most embarrassing things.