Reality Check

Fri Mar 16 17:17:42 UTC 2001

> On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 03:07:30PM -0800, Scott Francis wrote:
> > 
> > The same way people have learned to make sure that a search for "Anna
> > Kournikova" (for instance) returns, say, 200 records that are sites/pages
> > that have nothing whatever to do with Anna Kournikova, and a whole LOT to do
> > with bringing in cash to the sites in question.
> 
> This is self-defeating in the end; if your search site doesn't work, people
> will stop using it.
> 
Yes, but it's not the search engines that do it.  It's the web sites that
have learned how to put stuff in the view of the crawlers the search engines
use that will show up when someone is looking for unrelated content.

Since they do this in such a way that virtually EVERY search engine finds
their bogus content, they don't care how many search engines go out of
business, they'll just afflict the next one to come up.

> If they stop using it, the advertising dollars will stop rolling in.
> 
> Thus, it's in the best interest of the owner of the search site to fix
> the problem.  Hence why people are flocking to the latest best technology
> they can find, such as Google.
> 
Google is not immune to this, althoug it is better than some.

Owen