About frickin' time, Google! Content farms suck!

According to Business Insider, Google is setting its search-engine-spam-busting sights on those low-quality, content-deprived content farms typified by Demand Media's sites (ehow.com and answerbag.com, for example).

You know, those ad-rich and content-deficient sites. They often dominate top slots in Google's search engine results for popular terms. The searches that once provided links to helpful sites run by people who gave a damn about content quality first, and ad revenue second (if at all).

While we can't be sure when, or indeed if, these attention-wasting sites will drop out of Google's (and other search engine) search results pages, it sounds as if there is reason to be hopeful. Time will tell.

More info:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-s...
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-search-spam-2011-1

Addendum

TechCrunch agrees: We need a new and better Google. The time is right for a new search engine, one that isn't so easy to game.

Content creation is big business, and there are big players involved. For example, Associated Content, which produces 10,000 new articles per month, was purchased by Yahoo! for $100 million, in 2010. Demand Media has 8,000 writers who produce 180,000 new articles each month. It generated more than $200 million in revenue in 2009 and planning an initial public offering valued at about $1.5 billion. This content is what ends up as the landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web. And these are the first links that show up in your Google search results.

The bottom line is that we’re fighting a losing battle for the web and need alternative ways of finding the information that we need. I hope that Blekko and a new breed of startups fill this void: that they do to Google what Google did to the web in the late 90’s—clean up the spam and clutter.