While I agree there is junk in the search engines, I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you describe. I search for things everyday both for work and personal pursuits and I can’t remember not finding what I was looking after a little digging.

Will things change? Someday I suspect they will. Not because the search engines do anything, but rather because the advertisers do. If they stop getting something out of their advertising then I would expect them to stop running ads. Or at the very least, they’ll opt-out of the content network as Google calls it which would pretty much end the whole MFA problem.

In the meantime, I’m happy to make money off of my web site’s content

Speaking as the author one of those “small, personally-run sites that truly provides unique content to the web” I can’t honestly say that what you describe has caused me any difficulties. I have never attempted to get noticed by the search engines. The key to my visits has been viral spreading from key forum hosts like shoutwire and torrentspy.

How and why they first noticed my stuff, I’ve no idea, but since they did, they’ve begun a viral spread which still brings me about a thousand visits a day. (It peaked at 9000)

As you can see from (http://extremetracking.com/open;ref2?login=harrysto)
96% of my traffic (since Xmas) has come from websites and only a couple of % from search engines.

Also, I have to say, speaking as a serious researcher, that I don’t have much trouble finding what I’m looking for on the web, despite the high volume of “chaff”. I concede, however, that my expertise probably gives me an advantage over the “normal” user.

From my point of view, though I see the attempt being made, by the financially obsessed, to feed off the plankton in the ways you describe, it hasn’t stood in my way and I don’t see it seriously hampering other serious attempts at creating original material. And if the material is good enough, it eventually gets noticed. I suspect those of us capable of sustaining some reasonable level of creativity aren’t going to be that easily buried.

Having said all that, what I was really hoping for by the end of your piece, was some indication of what you propose, if anything, to do about it and you gave us nothing in that regard.

One of my obsessions is “authentication” and I can find “authentication issues” in almost all fields of human activity on and off the web. The problem you are addressing is a classic authentication issue.

a) how do we know who the author is?
b) or when they wrote it?
c) or whether what we are reading is the unaltered original?
d) or how far we can trust the content.

I argue that the solution lies in a myriad of self selected self assembling “webs of trust”, one of which led me to your site – viz Stumble. (http://www.stumbleupon.com/)

Because I’m a fairly regular Stumbler (and I was cleverly recruited by learning that my own site had been “stumbled” upon) I’ve learned to trust the choices of my fellow stumblers and the Stumbling system has a fairly detailed record of my likes, indifference and, rare, dislikes. As a result, I find the success rate – expressed as the percentage of sites which incur my approval – is a very creditable 80% plus. Far higher than any Search engine but, on the down side, not easily searchable.

However, imagine combining something like Google with something like Stumble. (Goomble?) Such that we could, perhaps specify that we only want to see those results in the Search results which have previously been “approved” by fellow Stumblers.

Now for “fellow Stumblers” read “fellow historical researchers” or “fellow physicists” or “fellow followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” and you begin, I hope, to see how we can improve the functionality of the engines.

The question is, who’s got the time, inclination and resources to get that ball rolling?

Thank you both for the thoughtful comments.

>>The question is, who’s got the time, inclination and resources to get that ball rolling?

The industry never stands still. All three major engines have “personalized” search options that attempt to learn from your preferences now and should only improve in the future.

Your idea of mashing up social bookmarking with this personalized search is an excellent approach, but as is evident with Digg or any system under user control, attempts will be made to profit from it. With a few thousand unique visitors waiting for any story that makes to the Digg front page, the temptation is evident and the accounts created only for voting stories up are rampant.

The web has grown too large for directory style intervention (a la the early days of Yahoo!) and it seems unmanageable algorithmically. While Google does not do it, the amount of hand-coding of search results that goes into Yahoo! and MSN might surprise the general public. Check out this one example of a Yahoo! search that they obviously do not hand code:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=ephedrine

One inventive tool that Yahoo! does offer to fight this is called Mindset — allowing you to vary the search results between informative and commercial. Here is the same result through the Mindset shopping/information filter:

http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/search.php?p=ephedrine

One more point…

>>96% of my traffic (since Xmas) has come from websites and only a couple of % from search engines.

>>Also, I have to say, speaking as a serious researcher, that I don’t have much trouble finding what I’m looking for on the web

If you were looking for your own articles with Google, it sounds as if they may be difficult to find. With only a few % of your visitors coming from search engines, you illustrate the point perfectly. Since you have significant traffic, browsers must find your site useful or interesting.

So why are you not found in search engines when people are looking for pages related to your keywords?

i dont get what you are trying to say with these articles. is it “the internet is doomed, stop even try to make a site with good content cause there is no point?”

the vibe of all your articles is very negative and destructive … why bother? you raise some very valid points but please – be more positive. you make me feel like throwing my pc out the window

“but as is evident with Digg or any system under user control, attempts will be made to profit from it.”

Checkout Stumble. Its not like Digg or anything else I’ve come across. I challenge anyone to demonstrate the kind of exploit you describe. It’s certainly not obvious. And I don’t think they deliberately designed it with that problem in mind but, accidentally, they’ve created a structure which is very difficult to subvert.

My mother didn’t even know she had a web presence, but if you type in the name of the shop and the town, it’s the third entry on google. Which somewhat startled her, she paid for magazine advertising and they did the rest as a way to market the magazine

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