If you have been frustrated lately by search results on Google, you’re not alone, and Google knows it.
There’s been a drumbeat of criticism of Google’s search results coming out of Silicon Valley — and now the Internet giant has responded, saying it has heard “the feedback from the Web loud and clear” and believes it “can and should do better.”
In particular, the company is talking about stopping “content farms,” which provide low-quality, often unreliable and sometimes plagiarized information on a certain topic, just to get traffic from search.
Google has been making changes to its algorithm to keep low-quality sites from appearing high in searches, search guru and principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in an official blog post Friday.
But he also writes that, despite Google’s efforts, “The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.”
It’s unclear whether today’s post has anything to do with yesterday’s announcementthat co-founder Larry Page will be replacing Eric Schmidt as chief executive. But the mea culpa highlights one of the big questions Google has been facing lately: whether its search quality has taken a hit.
Just this month, there have been several posts from prominent tech insiders lamenting the state of Google results.
“Google has become a jungle: A tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to Web sites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search,” wrote University of California at Berkeley visiting scholar Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch.
Software developer Jeff Atwood has complained about content farms in particular. “Last year, something strange happened: The content syndicators began to regularly outrank us in Google for our own content,” he wrote.
Content farms, in general, publish thousands of Web pages a day in an effort to draw views from Google searches. A Wired article from 2009 described their goal this way: “To predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results.”
Sometimes the goal is achieved through low-quality but original articles and videos. Sometimes the sites cut and paste or compile content written elsewhere and use “search-engine optimization” techniques to get their own pages to appear higher in results.
In fairness, content farms are a problem that all major search engines are facing — but Google gets the lion’s share of the attention because it has the lion’s share of the search market.
And Google makes the point that it has made significant progress against “search spam,” in which sites patently lie about what is on the page, inserting keywords to attract people to sites that don’t actually have appropriate content at all.
“A decade ago, the spam situation was so bad that search engines would regularly return off-topic webspam for many different searches. For the most part, Google has successfully beaten back that type of ‘pure webspam,’” Mr. Cutts writes.
Content farms, however, are a different story — much trickier, and when you get down to it, just as annoying for readers.
Google’s algorithm proved to be fairly adept at detecting blatant lies about what was on the page. But information from content farms really is pertinent to the search terms at hand — even if it’s not actually what the reader wants. It’s something that a human is easily able to recognize, but maybe computer intelligence isn’t quite there yet.
And if Google’s algorithm just favors “trusted” sites like major media companies, that could create problems for sites that are obscure but contain legitimate information.
On a recent visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, I was deeply struck by the words of a 15-year-old I met called Olivier who is living with HIV and receiving treatment with the help of the Global Fund.
He looked at me intensely, his eyes burning with new-found hope, and said: "Thanks to you we are healthy and we can make our dreams come true. Antiretroviral (ARV) medicines are making us strong."
Olivier is one of 5 million people who are getting life-saving treatment in the developing world, compared with a mere handful barely a decade ago. Another 10 million people living with HIV need treatment and will eventually die unless they too are put on medication.
Whenever money intended for people like Olivier is stolen, it is an affront to the donors who put their trust in us and an outrage for people still waiting to start treatment whose lives are hanging by a thread.
That is why the Global Fund, which provides the funding but relies on governments, NGOs and faith-based organizations to implement health programs in the field, pursues corruption so relentlessly and insists that every cent that goes missing is paid back. Our zeal has occasionally come as a shock to some of our recipients who are not used to being held to such exceptionally high standards of transparency and accountability. We see this as a partnership, a joint enterprise between donors and recipients, in which all can learn. We have found, for example, that money intended for training programs has been misappropriated in a number of countries and we are doubling our vigilance in this area.
Fortunately, the dramatic results we are delivering in the fight against the three diseases show that the vast majority of the funds that the Global Fund disburses are reaching people in need. Programs supported by the Global Fund are saving 4,400 lives every day.
A report by the Associated Press on Sunday referred to already well-documented incidents of misappropriation of funds that were reported by the Global Fund last year. While yesterday's media reports contained no real news, they drew attention to the fact that sums of money are sometimes misappropriated by people who are entrusted with managing our grants. What these reports also convey is the Global Fund has no tolerance whatsoever of corruption.
In its report last year, the Global Fund's Inspector General listed grave misuse of funds in four out of the 145 countries which receive grants from the Global Fund. As a result, immediate steps were taken in Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania and Zambia to recover misappropriated funds and to prevent future misuse of grant money.
The Global Fund is at present demanding the recovery of US $39 million unaccounted for in these and other countries out of a total disbursement of US $13 billion. We have already recovered nearly $5 million.
The Global Fund is working with the relevant authorities to ensure that those committing fraud are brought to justice. Criminal proceedings are already underway in Mali, Mauritania and Zambia.
In the words of our Inspector General: "The distinguishing feature of the Global Fund is that it is very open when it uncovers corruption. That is its comparative advantage."
Our openness inevitably leads to publicity every time we uncover wrongdoing. By going after corruption whenever we find it, we are determined to show both our donors and people like Olivier, whose lives depend on our funding, that we will not let them down.
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