Google Fights Content Farms—By Putting Users to Work

Feb. 16, 2011

Under: SEO

Google Logo A new Chrome extension was released by Google on Monday and it aims to help the search engine detect content farms by having users give “explicit feedback” on shallow, low-quality content. Essentially the extension allows users to block websites with poor content from their search results. Once a user blocks a site, a notification is sent to Google allowing them to, “study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for search results.” The extension also allows users to manage blocked sites, and unblock them at any time.

It seems like the goal of the extension is to utilize user feedback to locate the worst content offenders, and to then use that information to adjust search results, limiting the undesirable websites that end up ranking for users’ search queries. It’s an interesting concept, and while it will give users a little more control over which websites appear and their results and which won’t, it does have some weaknesses.

What are the problems with this kind of approach?

People have to take the time to search out and download the extension
People have to be using Chrome
People have to continuously edit their results to keep data relevant
Content farms can sabotage each other using the system

A similar process was recently adopted by a competitor search engine, Blekko, where they block the 20 most spam-filled sites from their results entirely based on user feedback.

If you want to download the extension and give it a try you can do so here.

What do you think? Do you think that using crowdsourcing techniques to develop effective content farm-detecting algorithms will be a successful approach?

Posted by Amberlie Denny at February 16, 2011 8:45 AM