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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly right. Quick bit of advice for startups here:

Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.

This planted PR piece uses a bit of customer data to demonstrate that the technology makes great business sense. So far so good. This particular piece of data, though, will be read as "Markov chains creating content to spam up the search results" by folks inside the Googleplex, and it makes them look stupid. Don't make Google look stupid. If you do make Google look stupid, don't brag about it in the NYT. It will not end well.

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It only makes Google look stupid if it's bad content that gets ranked highly. I've taken several classes with Birbaum and Hammond and the goal isn't to make bad content to fool search engines, it's to make content so good it seems as if a human wrote it. If that's actually the case there's no conflict in Google -- good content gets pushed to the top.

it's to make content so good it seems as if a human wrote it. If that's actually the case there's no conflict in Google -- good content gets pushed to the top.

There's an easy way to achieve that: have an actual human write it. This solution does not necessarily win one good will with Google: for one obvious example, most of the content farms were farming manually rather than farming with Markov chains.

I also think "good content" only craters the approach to the bridge of describing both a) what actually ranks on Google and b) what, in an ideal world, Google thinks would rank on Google.

Maybe they are so good they hope Google can tell their stories from human made. Although I wouldn't bet on it.

Google is already working to attribute authors to content, think of it as PersonRank. With verified real people (they are getting many signals for this such as android, chrome, checkout, places, voice, plus, etc) they may be able to combat spam like this by ranking news/stories based on the history of the author.

A single article probably not, if you examine a site producing these in high volume though you would probably notice a high level of similar words and constructs used. Even just by the speed at which certain things are posted, if something is consistently the first source after something like a sporting event they are either doing a lot of pre-writing or are generated.

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