Mahalo's Calacanis: Time To End The Content Farm Arms Race

Boy am I in trouble over this one. :-)

Honestly, Jason, this is the only time I've found myself agreeing with you. Mahalo was a low SNR, spam-driven, visually abhorrent, search-result-polluting pile of useless self-referential scraped-off-wikipedia bullshit that I wanted to burn to the ground so badly that I wrote code to excise it from search results before its inchoate content managed to scream dimly from somewhere below two folds worth of weight loss ads, "help me."

I'll give you a good slow clap.

Keyboard kill for you. "Tell us how you really feel!"

"Help, I was trying to salt the soup and it got oversalted! The best solution is to ask everyone else to stop salting it, too!"

I'm not sure this "We spent SIX MILLION DOLLARS on our how to bathe a Zebra page!" nonsense is really going to work.

The problem here is that folks want to know stuff that has very little -- but measurable -- value in terms of advertising dollars. You are not going to make Champagne pages for folks with beer budgets. Doesn't make sense.

More honestly, this is an issue of making Google look bad. It's the Deadly Sin of web content.

So gee. I don't know, maybe Google should worry about making itself look better? If that means de-listing E-how, then so be it.

Instead of focusing on the beginning of this arms race, the filling in of trivial content, we should be focusing on the end of the race: a net full of cool, informative, and deep articles about just about every subject imaginable. That's a noble goal -- but in my opinion you have to crawl before you can walk. Shutting these guys down isn't going to do much except stifle innovation.

All content generators -- bloggers, e-mags, content farms, micro-sites and the rest of them -- need from Google is a fair, level playing field. One rule for everybody. After that is accomplished, then I would expect people who make content would start making crappy content, Google would raise the bar, and this back-and-forth will continue for a while.

Sounds all pretty normal to me. For every page that ranks highly that ticks somebody off, somewhere out there, some kid has a hamster who is just tickled pink there is a set of instructions on how to wash it.

I think the real thing that's going on here is that lots of money is getting involved so the players are starting to posture, both to the investors, the search engines, and the competition. Wonder what they imagine their various end-games are. Love to be a fly on the wall in some of those board meetings.