I got some good news yesterday. Something that just about made me do a happy dance. Google came out with an extension for Chrome that allows users to block whole websites from their search results. Someone tweeted that link to me and I about fell over myself to install that damned thing. Have one for yourself if you’d like.
You can see the screenshots over at the Google blog, so I won’t post them here. Here’s the deal: When you do a Google search there will be a link below the results. If you’d rather not see 3 whole pages of eHow.com or Yahoo! Answers, then just click that link and voila! The extension takes all results from those sites and puts them down the sewer drain– where they belong. I mean, really, when was the last time you got any good information off of either of those sites? But do a search about “how to…” and you’re stuck sorting through that drivel to find your answer.
This is bad for me because if I’m trying to do something while I’m having a bad fog1 day I’ll jump on Google to give my memory retrieval process a kick start. That’s frustrating and time consuming. Have you read some of those articles on eHow? Holy shitballs! But then that’s one of those sites that the blackhatters like to game. And they don’t make an effort to make sure their milled content is helpful in any way. They want their $15. Anyway, when I’m actually looking for something I make sure to avoid certain sites, but then I’ll have to go to the 2nd or 3rd page of the search.
So, now I can eliminate those sites from my search completely. My geeky, Google-loving self went all kinds of giddy. And it works well. Be careful, though. If you eliminate a domain, it’s the whole domain. I’ve found useful stuff on About.com, for instance, but a lot of people don’t like it. Do you sometimes find good content on a domain? If you do, don’t click that block link below the result. Easy peasy.
Some say this is going to eventually hurt the content mills. I don’t know about that because this extension is working on an individual basis. Google, of course, is analyzing the results and will probably use them in the future for their various algorithms, but right now these sites aren’t actually blocked for everyone. And if you’re not using Chrome, you can’t use this extension at all (Matt Cutts did say that Google may adopt it on the search page itself, so it’s available to all browsers). So a lot of Googlers are going to continue getting those results– at least until they learn what’s what. I also don’t think Google is going to take these sites out of their search results completely. I’m guessing their going to eventually devalue their pagerank and that’ll knock them back a couple of pages. This is not a bad thing.
Demand Studios, who own eHow, pays their writers upfront. They don’t offer revenue sharing, so their writers don’t have to worry about getting pageviews. Associated Content, though, pay their content producers pageviews. That could potentially harm the very slight income that a lot of those writers get each month. I feel bad for them, but I hate that so much of what’s on those sites is crap2. They’re writing keyword rich articles for the sole purpose of getting pageviews from Google. This just mucks up my search results (though not nearly as bad as eHow).
Some folks have wondered if this is a bad thing, because site competitors can go to places like Amazon Mechanical Turk and pay people 5¢ to install this extension and block sites. This could skew the results, right? I think, though, Google’s probably smarter than that. I can’t imagine that even 1,000 users can cause them to completely devalue a site. That’s just 1,000 mTukers who don’t get the search results anymore (and who knows if they’ll keep the blocks in place after they get paid). Here’s what I’ve learned: Google actually pays people to sit at home on their asses robo calling and rate search results and individual sites for quality. From what I understand, they actually pay pretty damned good for this. They contract through various companies that actually employee these lazy motherfuckers3 fine folks to do this job. So, after they’ve analyzed their initial batch of data and begin getting suspicious blocks, such as would be the blocks from spammers/assholes, they’ll have a real person check the quality.
I think that’s pretty awesome. One, they’re not going to just take a site out of their serps without actually looking at it. And, two, they’re paying people good money to do it4. This also gives sites that have been lost in the search results a fighting chance against sites like eHow and Associated Content. With these sites removed from the search pages, a smaller site may end up on page 1 or 2. And they’ll be able to make money or get their voices heard/work seen more often. Another plus!
It’s all good, until the spammers figure out a way to make money from it, but whatever. Right now it’s beneficial to the honest folk and keeps my searches a little less spammy.
Again, I do feel sorry for the honest producers at these content sites. They’re just trying to pay the bills. And, really, at least they’re getting paid something, which is way better than the poor Huffington Post bloggers who won’t see a dime. I certainly don’t want to see anyone struggling to pay the light bill, because I know how bad that gets. I’ve been there. It’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the companies who have built a foundation on getting ad clicks/views by gaming another company’s system– Google. Demand Studios just went public and Yahoo! just bought Associated Content– oops. We’ll see how that goes. Well, I won’t because I’ve blocked their sites from my search results. Anyway, maybe the honest writers will be able to stick some ads on their own sites, put up their articles there and have a fighting chance to be found via search. I wish them luck.
I’m not sure why I find this so exciting, but I do. I find it all so very fascinating. I know most of my readers don’t and you’re probably bored to tears right now. Sorry about that. But this dynamic between Google and the companies who are making millions of dollars betting on Google’s search is incredibly interesting to me. The idea that Google, when they do things like remove pagerank from link selling sites and create extensions such as the blocker, is evil because it hurts working people just boggles my mind. Why would you bet so much on the whim of another company like that? And then get angry when that company does something that hurts your bottom line? I haven’t read yet anyone crying because this extension is going to cost them money, but you can pretty much bet someone is going to at some point. And the writers who are relying on revenue sharing are going to be convinced that it’s not the fault of the companies built on Google’s search, but Google’s evil intentions, that made them lose their revenue stream (should it come to that).
Google has done a lot as a company to make my life easier and so I’m kind of on their side by default. This extension is just another way that helps me personally. So, I’ll probably write more about this topic in the future. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Update:
I was visiting driftglass and he was talking about the HuffPo not-going-to-pay blogger model. I felt a little inspired5 so I said:
I was watching the reaction to Google’s new Chrome extension yesterday and wandered what was going to happen to content mills (who, it seems, Google is targeting). I feel bad for the revenue sharing producers/writers, because this could cause that stream to dry up. At the same time I was glad for this extension.
Then I realized that the writers at Associated Content and places such as that have it way better than the bloggers at HuffPo, only because mill producers get paid something.
If Silver’s analysis of the traffic to the individual HuffPo blogs is right, then those who are writing for “exposure” aren’t getting any. In fact, they’d have been better off writing for Associated Content because they’d at least earn pennies for their few pageviews. As it stands, these bloggers are getting neither money nor exposure (and this publicity is ruining the validity of the clips they may use when trying to get paying gigs). Heh.
Nate Silver said:
At this 50:1 ratio, the average blog post, which received 43 comments, got about 2,150 page views. This distribution, however, was highly inequitable. The top-performing blog post — one by the former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich — had received 547 comments (tantamount to about 27,000 page views) as of Friday morning. By contrast, more than 40 percent of the blog entries received 5 comments or fewer.
[...]
Do the multiplication, and you find that the average blog post — which we estimate generated a couple thousand page views — was worth about $13 in advertising revenue. The median blog post, with several hundred views, was worth only $3 or $4. Even Mr. Reich’s strongly-performing post was worth only about $170, by our estimates.[...]
Another reason, perhaps, that the “slave ship” allegation sometimes sticks to The Huffington Post is because there is a discrepancy between the “250 million unique visitors” that Ms. Huffington pitches her bloggers on, and the much, much smaller number who have any realistic chance of encountering, yet alone reading, any given post. Their median blog post, by our estimate, gets only about 550 page views. That equates to about 1 in every 450,000 of the unique visitors that Ms. Huffington says AOL and The Huffington Post will have each month once they combine forces.[emphasis added]
That is all.
- Fibro fog is one of the worst symptoms. [↩]
- Produced by people who don’t give a flying fuck or blackhatters spinning/”re-writing” articles. [↩]
- This is sarcasm, by the way. Some folks think that this kind of work isn’t valuable and is only done by lazy people who can’t find real jobs. [↩]
- And, honestly, there is nothing shameful about this kind of work. There is nothing shameful or debasing about working from home. There is nothing wrong with anyone trying to make an honest living this way. [↩]
- Actually, I felt this way a couple of different times today. I’m thinking this flare might finally be letting up. [↩]
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