Content Farms Fear Blekko More Than Google

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A few weeks ago Google announced that it would be cracking down on the content farms for the benefit of their users. This popular search engine decided to respond to the needs and complaints of their users that were fed up with sites that provided very little original information. Content farms enlist copy or text from writers, experts or not, to generate information that directly correlates with search engine queries. What Google has done is change their algorithm to effectually decrease the relevancy of certain sites on the results page when a particular search is made.

Blekko is one of the newest search engines out there but has already managed to surpass Google's policy in a more stringent way. Instead of simply adjusting the way that rankings are created Blekko has eliminated over one million websites that don't meet their standards or their user's standards. The new shake up prevents these sites from competing all together. Many of the websites affected are ones that have a lot of advertising and insufficient information. Since many of these sites gain revenue based on page views, they will certainly lose ...
... money due to both of the changes from these search engines.

I can understand where Blekko might be trying to go with their new policy. It is completely reasonable to want to refine search results for your users but the matter of who decides what sites are worthy is an entirely different matter. There are some sites that should not just be eliminated entirely. Is there a team of people at Blekko that are doing the screening? Who determines what sites get cut and what factors make a site qualified to be cut? At lease with Google, sites have the opportunity to improve their rankings with better content. Blekko just completely took 1.1 million sites out the game. For a fledgling web search engine like Blekko that just launched in November 2010, this policy could either make or break them.

Taking search engine result management to such an extreme could discourage some users from using their service. Many users, although largely annoyed by frivolous web sites, sometimes want the option of weeding through sites and making up their own mind about what is useful and what is not. Blekko takes that option away from users in a very dictatorial kind of mother knows best manner. The premise for their decision is sound, but in reality some people don't want to use a search engine that is limited, even if it is better for them.

It will be interesting to see how users respond to their strategy for producing high quality search results. I am on the fence about it. With Google as the industry leader, many search engines like Yahoo! and Bing are sure to follow suit. To what degree they will do so is a mystery for now. Blekko is trying to make a very bold statement that will set it apart from other web search engines in order to gain a faithful following.