Fortune Favors The Bold

merlin:

Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches — from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons — churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you’re done. On the web, no-one knows you’re a content-grinder.
[…]

Something has to give, but I wonder what will — the snake, its tail, or us?

Posting empty BS at scale has never been without its cost to those of us who actually use Google for more than bootstraping a score of execrable income muses.

But, over the past year or two, the urine-to-potable-water ratio of our public well has gone totally out of whack.

The wink-wink, nudge-nudge tolerance for empty Google bait needs to stop. It’s no longer simply a matter of bringing unnecessary tragedy to an already-littered commons—we’re at risk of seeing our biggest public library turn into a pile of empty books whose flashy covers contain nothing but coupons for more empty books.

[via Sippey]

BWAHAHAHA at this:

For my part it has had a number of side-effects… it has made me more willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers — the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Oh, the arrogance! This isn’t a search for information you are entitled to receive for free! Go to an actual library and ask for information about dishwasher reviews… 9 times out of 10, they will have some periodicals on-file that would provide that info, and nothing more; you would not load it up in 0.00016 seconds in a keyword search unless you were using Lexis-Nexus; in most cases you’d have to pay for photocopies to get the info out of the library; and, just to be absolute, neither magazines nor Lexis-Nexus are free products.

THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF USEFUL COMMERCIAL INFORMATION THAT YOU SHOULD PAY FOR, AND NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT DOING SO. You’re paying, say, $2 to get research information about a FOUR HUNDRED DOLLAR APPLIANCE? You’re rich enough for the appliance, but you would complain about that $2? $2 is less than the cost of a plate to wash. $2 is less than the price of dish soap and a sponge to wash your drool-encrusted dishes by hand.

But, as the mentality goes: I once found similar information for free by accident, so you owe it to me!

Note that it’s around the same level of arrogance to walk into Sears, have a floor salesman run you through a demo of the top 3 or 4 products that you think are most suitable for you, take mental note of the one you want, and then go home and order it on Amazon because it’s $10 cheaper there. I have done this! (But not to Sears) What’s arrogant about this is that if the one floor salesman at Sears was busy with the line of customers who would mostly do the EXACT SAME THING, and there was only one salesman because Sears is laying off people so they can cut prices to compete with sales-help-less Amazon.com, then the customer in question would stomp out of the store empty-handed and curse at Sears for not giving the LEVEL OF SERVICE YOU HAVE COME TO EXPECT.

(Plus: are you entirely dependent upon online customer recommendations to make any purchasing decisions that you’re not 100% sure of in the first place? Have you tried this in a brick and mortar store, ever? Walked around the store and found the first person who seemed willing to freely talk about whatever you were asking about? This is how you find mentally ill people in society, and this is how you end up with a dishwasher that leaves broccoli permanently stuck to your wine glasses.)

Google WORKS. Product research on the Internet WORKS. That article should have been about how Consumer Reports is the solution to a miasma of spam results on Google… not how Google needs to solve the problem of preventing you from paying for information good enough to be the #2 result on a direct search for retail product research.