Latest Google Spam Technique: Invent Fake Street Addresses And Show Up In Google Listings | Techdirt

I'm getting a bit worried that the spammers are starting to get a step ahead of Google.

From Techdirt:
"Latest Google Spam Technique: Invent Fake Street Addresses And Show Up In Google Listings"
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101228/11305412434/latest-google-spam-technique-invent-fake-street-addresses-show-up-google-listings.shtml


Here's another article on the future of search. Are algorithms played out? Can they all be gamed? From Paul Kedrosky:
"Curation is the New Search is the New Curation"
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/curation_is_the.html

"There are two things that can happen now. (Okay, three. We could stop search, which won't happen.). We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and others. Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again. Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation, but there are plenty of other examples."


Finally, some good news for Google, with a little bad news mixed in. From VentureBeat:
"Google already knows its search sucks (and is working to fix it)" by Peter Yared
http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/12/google-search/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29

The article admits that Google's search results have been deteriorating. "Search has been increasingly gamed by link and content farms year by year, and users have been frogs slowly getting boiled in water without realizing it. (Bing has similarly bad results, a testament to Microsoft’s quest to copy everything Google.)

"But here’s what these late-blooming critics miss: Yes, Google’s search results do indeed suck. But Google’s fixing it.

"The much acclaimed PageRank algorithm, which ranks search results based on the highest number of inbound links, has failed since it’s easy for marketers to overwhelm the number of organic links with a bunch of astroturfed links. Case in point: The Google.com page that describes PageRank is #4 in the Google search results for the term PageRank, below two vendors that are selling search engine marketing."

Here is the scary part:

"Facebook, which can rank content based on the number of Likes from actual people rather than the number of inbound links from various websites, can now provide more relevant hits, and in realtime since it does not have to crawl the web. A Like is registered immediately. No wonder Facebook scares Google."

The article points out that it wasn't necessarily the PageRank algorithm that set Google apart but the ability to implement it on a large scale.

So what is Google doing?

"Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results: They are instantly getting an answer to their question."