Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to wonder if killing the "content farms" like About and Answers and the like aren't a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Often when you search for a "how do I" question, the content farms are the only things that produce a result that's even vaguely topical, at least before Pandas.

I mean, it usually went content farms -> Pure SEO spam -> actual relevant results. Content farms weren't good, but they still beat the SEO spammers. At least the content farms had some minimal connection to the topic, unlike say eBay.

View on HN

I actually liked sites like eHow, but I'm probably in the minority here. If I wanted a quick answer for a question these sites were providing a good, quick answer. They are not going into a lot of depth, of course, but if I want that then I just use a bit more specific search terms.

So now I am supposed to search on eHow directly? Oh noes.

I think the point is that there are multiple sites like eHow, and searching each of them individually and then deciding which results were the best is sub-optimal. Plus, it prevents the serendipitous discovery of new sites like eHow.

If only there were a way to search multiple content farm sites at once, and rank those results according to how useful they were...

Google already does this, by its measure of "useful" (to you).

If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out"

was that so hard?

> Google already does this, by its measure of "useful" (to you).

The point was that they've been successfully more aggressively penalized, to the point where many of these sites are now no longer showing up more.

> If you don't like it, you can search those sites directly. For example search for "ehow:how to ask a girl out" was that so hard?

That defeats the primary purpose of using a general search engine - namely to get ranked results across a large number of sites.

But it is still doing its purpose. You can just tell it what you want to see.

I wish there was a way in Google to indicate you'd like to see results from a site ranked higher FOR YOU. I imagine they already learn that when you click on that domain in two separate searches.

They had good answers?

Everything I ever saw on a content farm looked like it was written by somebody who knew nothing about the topic, but did a quick Google search and extracted some semi-random bullet points from the first few things they saw. Basically, I could get the same value by clicking on the first non-content-farm link and then skimming.

The quality varies. Sometimes the content is good.

It's interesting that About gets cited as a terribad content farm, but I actually find they have a useful bunch of stuff for me while I'm learning French - handy reminders of rules around converting verbs to adverbs was one I used this week, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com