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Tech

Google Should Have Left Search Spam Alone

And a reminder that not everything on the internet is going to be amazing and awesome.
A shedding blade in action/Wikipedia

In case you missed it, Demand Media won. A few years ago, the floods of how-to and pseudo-reference content being churned out as fast as humanly possible by hideously underpaid assembly line writerlings was one of the leading sources of journalistic hand-wringing. The end of the world for people like me were algorithmically generated, search hyper-optimized topics covered by autopilot intellects just filling space. The notion that that was to be my competition and that it very well might win was terrifying to me, and a whole lot of people in my position. Quietly, however, and despite Google’s occasional anti-search spam tweak, content farms fell out of the future-internet discussion.

Nonetheless, Demand Media, the owner of search bait operations like eHow, Cracked.com, Livestrong.com (lol), and Trails.com—a free trial trap I once fell for—remains mostly dug into its original business model, filling holes the internet didn’t know it had. Since its troubled 2011 IPO, Demand hasn’t exactly been doing gangbusters, but it’s still buying stuff up. Most recently, the $325 million (2011) company purchased the domain name registrar Name.com and, more interesting, Society6, a retailer selling indie art prints on t-shirts and iPhone cases. Last year, it also acquired Creativebug, an arts-and-crafts subscription video website.

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The diversification makes sense: Google’s made no bones about operations like Demand being a problem and in 2013, the company was forced to lower its second quarter earnings due to waning traffic to its flagship site, eHow.com. In some part, that traffic reduction had to do with Google’s pushback, effectively handicapping content farm sites in search results. Now, in 2014, three years after the Demand IPO and as Demand's content farm operations continue to suffer, I want to ask, were we wrong? Was our top serious journo frothing a bit misplaced? And if we weren’t wrong, we as “real” writers of the internet at the very least need to reformulate our rebuttal.

Just now I typed eHow into my search bar to bring up some of my own personal browsing history with the site: “How to brush a dog with a shedding blade”; “Instruments used in Mambo”; “What is the growing time for red potatoes.” Those weren't my searches, they're article titles. After first asking, what even the fuck is my life? I want to suggest that the search spam of 2011 has in 2014 become, well, the actual answers we were looking for in the digestible on-the-fly format we were looking for. Somehow, things went according to Demand's plan.

While we were fretting over Demand pushing good content off the internet, its algorithms were interested in something quite different: shedding blades and other mundane semi-obscure topics that we, even as discriminating content consumers, don’t particularly care where the information comes from, just that we can access it quickly from a search bar.

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I’m always pretty amazed at the depths of eHow and the notion that some person out there filled in even just a few paragraphs about some everyday garbage the rest of us couldn’t be bothered with. That’s the reformulation: not everything on the web needs to be amazing. That’s what the promise of search spam really was: the alignment of the internet’s ideals with its reality, or our reality as creatures living mostly banal, non-amazing lives.

Last night, I was fiddling with a new-to-me film camera in my truck, navigating a bunch of new dials and functions. It’s an old camera, and searching brings up a PDF of the camera’s manual, but also an eHow how-to for this oldish device. Someone, for a few bucks, had skimmed that PDF for me and distilled a basic quick-start into an easygoing sheaf of webpages.

I don’t know what happens to that model in the future. Maybe it persists. Hopefully, it evolves. Imagine some future superpower of Yahoo Answers and eHow as arbitrators of online information. Because that’s the other somewhat embarrassing thing I use: Yahoo Answers. I actually think Yahoo Answers and other ad hoc info/answer forums are becoming some very large and fascinating part of the internet brain, a Wikipedia for people that just want their very specific questions answered. Which is some large part of why people use Wikipedia in the first place, of course.

We’re left with a hodgepodge of ugly, generic websites that get the job done for a wide variety of topics. These are the internet’s big box stores, in other words. We want to patronize the locally owned boutique-thing, but we’re still so often caught at Target or Walmart. It’s inexpensive and, hey, you can buy a fishing pole in the same place as you buy a sports bra or tablet computer. You’d rather not, of course, and yet …

This casts Google’s punishment of search spam sites in kind of a different light. They’ve resolved into something that is maybe not the out and out enemy, or at least not the kind of enemy we’re interested in ignoring. Yet Google is doing the ignoring for us, regardless. A few years ago this seemed like a perfectly acceptable response to a known internet villain, and people seemed to be clamoring for the death of Demand Media. Google was just listening to its customers, right? Now I’m not so sure.   
         
@everydayelk