The Good and The Bad

Somebody over at Threadwatch posted a tongue-in-cheek comment the other day that gives voice to a thought I've had often: Google is doing at least as much damage to the net as good.

I was just sitting here drinking my coffee and I had a thought. Far from making sense of the web as they purport to do, Google is single handedly turning it into a bloated disaster zone.

First they spouted the content mantra. Webmasters diligenlty pumed out millions of pages to satisfy the hungry cralwers.

Then they started the anchor text numbers game. People then went out and built millions of sites especially to promote their other pages.

Now we have adsense. Pages are now being made from crap especially to make as many adsense impressions as possible.

Add to that buying pagerank, blog and guestbook spamming (all due to Google's algorythms) and the rest and I wonder if it's a master plan to take down the net :)

I really don't think it's too funny. There are literally millions of web pages and links and spam of all sorts that wouldn't exist if Google didn't measure and value the things that they measure and value. Worse still is the fact that Google doesn't acknowledge the mess that's being made in their name. I blame them not because they should have had the foresight to expect all this, but because since it has happened all they've done (as far as I can tell) is stick their heads into the sand.

It's a tough problem, but they're smart folks.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at February 6, 2005 11:52 PM