Since we’ve developed the world’s best automated sentiment tagging engine, we’ve spent a lot of time working with various search tools trying to determine the best way to feed it accurate, timely, and complete content to score.
For those clients of ours who want to stay on top of what’s being said about them, many times we have utilized Google Blog Search as a key component to our monitoring efforts. The problem is that it seems to be declining significantly in terms of trustworthiness.
For fun I did a search today in order to compare two competing products that I lust after: the MacBook Air, and the HP/Voodoo Envy.
The Google Blog Search was:
voodoo envy “macbook air”
It provided 86 net results, and I examined each result carefully. Here’s what I concluded:
- 4 were dead links.
- 35 were spam blogs.
- 18 were mildly sploggy — brief abstracts of original content with links back to original source (usually automated extracts.)
- 1 was a complete duplicate of original content, but in a non-splog environment.
- 1 was a brief comment below a post.
- 27 were original content.
Bottom line, almost 70 percent of the results were noise, not signal.
In at least two cases, Google provided a splog entry but NOT the original piece the spammers stole from! (Yes the originals were syndicated via RSS…)
Splog one here. (appeared in search result.)
Real site here. (did not appear in search result.)
Splog two here. (appeared in search result.)
Real site here. (did not appear in search result.)
Sorry gang, but when spam is the number one result of a search, and original sources are MIA, something is wrong.
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