Five Things You Need to Know About Google’s ‘Farmer’ Search Engine Upgrade

On Friday, after several months of atypically harsh coverage of the quality of Google’s search results–see here and here–the planet’s dominant search engine rolled out some major changes. (It says it’s been working on them for months, since before the recent discontent surfaced.) A few quick notes about the update and related matters:

1. It’s not necessarily a content-farm killer.

The blogosphere is calling Google’s tweaks the “Farmer” update–a name I first saw used by Search Engine Land’s search guru, Danny Sullivan. That’s a reference to controversial “content farms” such as Demand Media (the parent of eHow), Yahoo’s Associated Content, and AOL’s Seed. Content farms crank out vast quantities of ad-supported content–much of it um, not so hot–that’s search engine-optimized to within an inch of its life, so it shows up as high as possible in Google results. But when I talked with Google Fellow Amit Singhal for a story I’m working on for this week’s dead-tree edition of TIME, he told me that the changes aren’t meant to penalize any particular site, or any specific type of content.

Number-crunching by Sistrix seems to confirm Singhal’s stance. eHow–perhaps the single best-known product of content farming–doesn’t seem to have been hurt by Google’s revisions. In fact, Sistrix says eHow is now doing better in Google’s results than before.

2. It’s still a big deal.

Singhal told me that the recent changes are among the most significant Google has ever implemented in one fell swoop: 11.8 percent of queries will get meaningfully different results than before. Like Sistrix, SEOClarity analyzed what’s changed. It reports that big-name sites such as Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, and Walmart.com are winners, while sites such as TheFind.com, BizRate.com, ShopWiki.com, EzineArticles, HubPages, and Associated Content are losers.

It’s tough to tell from these lists just how well Google has done at improving the overall quality of results. For what its worth, HubPages doesn’t strike me as providing anything like bottom-of-the-barrel material. But then there are sites such as EzineArticles, which is rife with items like this gem (“Moving around in a taxi seems like an outlandish thing…”).

3. Google isn’t saying how it’s defining and identifying “high quality” and “low quality” content.

Much of the magic of the venerable Google algorithm is pretty objective–such as the way it takes a high volume of inbound links to a specific site as evidence that the Web has decided that the site is important. Rating a piece of content as “high quality” or “low quality,” on the other hand, is an inherently subjective process. Google isn’t sharing details on its techniques: Singhal told me that doing so would help those who seek to game the system.

4. If you use Chrome, you can decide which sites are “low quality.”

Back on Valentine’s Day, Google released an add-in for its Chrome browser called Personal Blacklist. It lets you block entire domains from showing up in results with a click, permitting you to eradicate any ones which you simply don’t think are worth your time. It’s a separate project from the “Farmer” search update, but Google says that its search adjustments address 84 percent of the top few dozen sites most often blocked by Personal Blacklist users to date.

5. Other sites are fighting lousy search results, too.

For a category that feels like a duopoly–hello, Google and Bing!–search actually has its share of scrappy newcomers. So if you’re dissatisfied with the superpowers, try a mom-and-pop search engine such as Blekko, Duck Duck Go, or Topsy. All three aim to remove spammy sites from your results–Blekko and Duck Duck Go by blocking some domains, and Topsy by listing pages based not on linkage around the Web but by how often they’re mentioned by influential Twitter users. I don’t know of any engines that are truly free of spam, low-grade farmed content, and other detritus, but these three are worthwhile antidotes to Google ennui.

So what’s your take on the state of Google’s search results–either in general or after Friday’s overhaul?

http://humagaia.wordpress.com humagaia

As a writer at Hubpages I was semi-pleased with your comment “For what its worth, HubPages doesn’t strike me as providing anything like bottom-of-the-barrel material”, however, I must admit that more recently much detritus has been written there. The staff and writers have been aware of this and tried to do something about it with a function called ‘HubHopping’ where crowdsourcing has been utilised to flag content that is less than the required standard.
The ‘farmer’ update may have shown that HubPages faired badly but I am hoping that what got hit was the dross, none of which will be missed.
However, if it proves to be that good quality content, of which there is much at HubPages, is adversely affected due to the dross element, it will be a sad day. This also goes for good quality content at other sites seemingly affected badly by this change.
My personal view is that the ‘farmer’ tag for this algorithm change may be more appropriate than one might think. If the multinational conglomerates (such as Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, and Walmart.com) are winners, at the expense of the tenant farmer (the writers at the ‘farms’) then, in the internet community, we are moving away from a FairTrade environment where the little man could earn a living at his/her desktop.
The first comments I saw from the searching community were ‘good-riddance’. I suggest that, if you are a searcher, you should be careful what you wish for – if you are given information by big business, that has a vested interest, I am unsure that it will be information that is unbiased.
Where Google and all other search engines get it wrong is in developing algorithms that rely on information that can be ‘gamed’.
Google, for instance, keeps information about every single search including the time a searcher stays at a webpage. Why not just use this and the number of views to determine a running rank of the veracity of a page in answering an entered query.
The results would be dynamic, very hard to ‘game’ and would allow the writers to do what they do best without having to SEO the hell out of their article to have any chance of it being returned high enough in the serps for it ever to be read.
http://jaydecenella.wordpress.com Jay Ar Decenella

In my view, it’s an option between readers and content producers. And Google chose the former, killing the latter.
http://humagaia.wordpress.com humagaia

Jay, searchers do not ask big questions. They ask questions that require a limited response as they flit from site to site. Big sites and big business answer big questions. Where the ‘farms’ come in handy is in answering the small questions succinctly.
Google has every right to do whatever they want but without the short answers surfers will flock to somewhere where they can get an answer quickly – such as social media sites – something that will see the demise of the big search engines.
A cull of content from the ‘farms’ may well prove to be the shot that started the haemorrhaging of search queries from the traditional search engines. We shall see.
http://voop556.wordpress.com voop556

I suggest DuckDuckGo. It has less spam, more privacy, !bang, and 0-click info.
cynvela

I write for content sites (aka content mills or content farms). I am a talented writer, with an excellent command of the written word. I love to write, and I do it well. And there are many MANY others like me who write researched, well-crafted articles for content sites.

Unfortunately –as with any group in society– we content writers are judged by the sins of the least skilled in our group. Although we are expert writers who write skillfully, we content writers are grouped in with those who pen (keyboard?) the likes of the “moving around in a taxi” article you referred to. It’s a little unfair to those of us who actually know how to write, and take pride in our work, that we are lumped in with those who write their content with seemingly little knowledge of English, let alone writing.

That said, I agree with Google’s new policies and algorithms. Although I did see some of my income plummet over the last few days, I anticipate that my other streams of income will increase as a result. I am a writer, and I love what I do…but the recent (deserved) negative attention that some unskilled “writers” have brought to the world of content writing has led me to make some changes. I use pen names now.