osama bin laden news: GOOGLE IS FOR SPAM

Elina Ivanova

If you use Google, you may have noticed the increasing number of 'made for AdSense' sites.

These sites usually contain masses of adverts and zero original content.

Sometimes the content has been 'stolen' from YouTube.

If you use Google, you may have found that, for a variety of reasons, it takes longer and longer to find what you are looking for.

There is too much junk, produced by people manipulating Google's page-ranking systems.

On 1 January 2011, Vivek Wadhwa explained why we desperately need a new (and better) Google

Vivek asked his students at UC-Berkeley to research the work history of the founders of certain companies.

"But it turns out that you can't easily do such searches in Google any more.

"Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers.

"Almost every search takes you to websites 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.

"We ended up using instead a web-search tool called Blekko."

http://blekko.com/

With Blekko, if you are looking for information about swine flu, you can add /health to your query and search only the top 70 or so relevant health sites rather than tens of thousands spam sites.

If you are doing searches by date, add /date to the end of your query.

/image etc etc.

Google is like the manufacturer of a brand of spam.

At first the spam contains the very best pork.

Eventually it contains an awful lot of offal.

Marilyn Monroe.