I'm gonna go out on a limb here: Who gives a shit?
Everyone treats Google like this super police agent who's job is to keep our minds free from digital pollution. Yet 97% of Google's income comes from their ad network, which thrives on having publishers and SERP pages to serve up their advertising customer's creatives. Ultimately, I'm sure Google is fine with this Mahalo stuff, because it means they have more ad space to publish on.
What Mahalo has going on is not much different than the major article directory sites like EZine and Associated Content. Search on one of those sites for corn on the cob and I bet you'll find a bunch of similar articles, all plastered with adsense. In fact, I have tools right now that can rewrite an article and allow me submit more corn on the cob articles in under a minute. But you never hear anyone bitch about those sites, because it's User Generated Content. Ultimately, how are they any different?
Honestly, knowing what I know about Black Hat SEO Tactics (I know a good amount), I'd rather see someone building out massive crappy content sites than spamming their backlinks everywhere. At least they aren't polluting everyone else's sites by getting XRumer blasts and Blog Comment Spamming.
Look: either they're going to control spam or they're not. But they can't reasonably own all of Internet search and navigation and be capricious about enforcing their intentionally obscure ranking rules. Google demands the benefit of the doubt from the entire Internet. They set this high standard for themselves, and they profit e n o r m o u s l y from the perception that they live up to it.
Not specific to Mahalo, but I certainly care about search results quality. My recent experience searching out answers to my Android programming questions (doing my first app) have led to frustration as the Google results appear promising, but upon clicking through, I find garbage aggregator websites. This may be a problem on all search engines, but its driving my domain-specific searches to sites like Stack Overflow.
I agree with ryanhuff. Recently I spent time searching for camera reviews - smaller, entry-level ones where there's less press. About 70% of the sites I got were these dumb contentless websites plastered with camera ads and affliate links (to stores like Amazon and Adorama). That's well and good, but after a couple of tries I began to be really pissed off at the lack of useful information.
I see the same issues while searching for certain bits of news. Earlier today I ran a search for Spain's loss to Switzerland (soccer, in the World Cup). Amongst the top results was a small section dedicated to Google News. Two of the three on display led me to ugly blogs, plastered with ads, that had essentially copied content from other news organizations and reposted them.
My point: somebody searching for actual angel cake recipes will be greatly annoyed every time they come across Mahalo's (content-less) pages. Sure, some of their pages have content, and are probably useful - but at what cost? I wish Google will address this, and soon.
I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat.
There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it.
A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search results. They can do it again.
> I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat.
Honest question, because I'm a recent DDG convert (and I'm not exactly an "early adopter" of anything) ... what do you think of its search results for this?
A DDG search of "camera reviews" gave http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ for its top hit, and the site actually seems pretty useful to me.
Dpreview is a great site. So - yes, I'm going to go check DDG out soon. Thanks, thaumaturgy.
PS: Whether or not DDG returns the specific Dpreview site for a specific camera model is still up in the air, I suppose. But I'll remember DDG as an alternative the next time Google results are getting in my way.
"There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it."
Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you? Google's algo is a huge step up from the days when you can stuff your meta keywords to get up to the top of the previous SE's.
It's in Google's best interest to find the best content to return for given keywords. Now best to techies implies high quality, unbiased, trusted content. Good to an SEO implies highly optimized, well targeted content. Good to Google is high converting, ad-serving and user-clicking worthy content.
It's not as simple as serving perfect, good quality content for Google. They have an ad network to cater to first, searchers come second.
That MFA sites are wrecking Google's search quality or that they're not? You seem to push both points in the one post which is even more confusing given "Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you?"
They have an ad network to cater to first, searchers come second.
I'd like to think that isn't true. But if it was, my point stands - as a searcher, I am willing to go somewhere where the searchers come first. Search is not a lock-in. Changing search engines is almost painless.
Everyone wants high quality search results, of course. But like I said in my OP, Google is a for profit company that depends on high traffic keyword searches and high volume publishers to maintain their livelihood. It's not that far of a stretch for them to not necessarily be dying for "quality" search results as much as we are. If the lower quality results are making them money, it would be against their own business model to squelch them.
So it really is a question of who this issue is affecting. For us, it's annoying. For Google, it's a profit source.
You are absolutely correct. However, at that point it becomes an ethics issue. If these are financially motivated search results without disclosure then it becomes a whole different ball of wax. If they are deliberately screwing up their relevancy algorithm in the name of a bottom line then people need to know that.
The reason people trust and believe the spam search results that come up and blindly make purchases on those sites is the same reason they can't realize that Google isn't some non-profit public service but is in reality an ad-littered money machine: people are stupid.
I don't think you're right here - Google's stated aim has long been to provide the best search experience for its users. Nothing it has done in the past, empirically, has shown that it wants anything otherwise. Even Cutts's response in the article above exposes such thinking.
To Google, what's best for the company is best for its users. Bing (and now DDG) are hot on their heels, and so it doesn't make sense when you claim that there's a split between what Google wants and what we want, which are better search results, etc etc.
Everyone treats Google like this super police agent who's job is to keep our minds free from digital pollution. Yet 97% of Google's income comes from their ad network, which thrives on having publishers and SERP pages to serve up their advertising customer's creatives. Ultimately, I'm sure Google is fine with this Mahalo stuff, because it means they have more ad space to publish on.
What Mahalo has going on is not much different than the major article directory sites like EZine and Associated Content. Search on one of those sites for corn on the cob and I bet you'll find a bunch of similar articles, all plastered with adsense. In fact, I have tools right now that can rewrite an article and allow me submit more corn on the cob articles in under a minute. But you never hear anyone bitch about those sites, because it's User Generated Content. Ultimately, how are they any different?
Honestly, knowing what I know about Black Hat SEO Tactics (I know a good amount), I'd rather see someone building out massive crappy content sites than spamming their backlinks everywhere. At least they aren't polluting everyone else's sites by getting XRumer blasts and Blog Comment Spamming.