More free money from Google for site scrapers

Back in December I wrote an article on how site scrapers were gaming Google’s search algorithm in order to make advertising money from articles that they scrape from RSS feeds. Just after I wrote this piece, Google got religion about spam sites and revamped their search engine results to penalize content farms. Yet, the problem with scrapers still remains

Wadhwa: Google Search Still Needs ‘A Lot More Work’

I am excited about the opportunities ahead that social networking presents. Right now, Facebook is shooting itself in the foot by compromising user trust with dubious moves on privacy issues. However, if Facebook plays its cards right and concentrates on search it could be a winner – and that is a big threat to Google. Google is concentrated on Microsoft as its main competitor. But social networks could end run Google by developing compelling search functionality. Moreover, Google is annoyed by the Facebook walled garden model because it has meant a huge amount of data regarding what users are doing on the web is unavailable to Google but is available to Facebook

Latest News from Credit Writedowns

This is just a brief update regarding changes at Credit Writedowns. First, you may have noticed that my posting schedule has slowed down a decent amount. I have a few things on my plate and haven’t been able to devote as much time to the blog as I would like. Actually, I was away in

Desperately Seeking Search

Internet search is broken.

Battered by spammers, content farms and black hat optimizers, the typical Internet search is a horrible mess. Try basic search terms like "washing machine". Or try a term relevant to this site like "Finance Blog". What you get is a bunch of tricksters who have gamed the search engines to bring their clearly less relevant sites to the top of the pile. You as the user have to wade through these sites, hoping to find something remotely relevant to your search. Many give up in frustration. And while this situation is most acute at Google because their large search market share makes them a target for these shenanigans, the situation is better at Bing/Yahoo, but pretty much the same.

How do we solve this problem?