In Dr. Laura, Associated Content and the Googledammerung Scott Rosenberg lamented about the state of Google News, and rightly so.
Is Google News useful? Certainly on a good day.
Is it human? Not so much.
A week after the Dr. Laura n-word controversy hit the fan, Rosenberg typed |Dr. Laura n-word| in Google News and was amazed to see a story from Associated Content at the top of the results
AC, of course, is the “content farm” recently acquired by Yahoo; it pays writers a pittance to crank out brief items that are — as I’ve written — crafted not to beguile human readers but to charm Google’s algorithm.
AC’s appearance in the Google lead position surprised me. I’d always assumed that, inundated by content-farm-grown dross, Google would figure out how to keep the quality stuff at the top of its index. And this wasn’t Google’s general search index recommending AC, but the more rarefied Google News — which prides itself on maintaining a fairly narrow set of sources, qualified by some level of editorial scrutiny.
Rosenberg goes on to quote the lead paragraph from the AC story, which squeezes the phrase “Dr. Laura n-word” three times into one paragraph. Rosenberg correctly pegs the style — or more accurately, the lack thereof — to nothing more than the “determination to catch Google’s eye by repeating the phrase ‘Dr. Laura n-word’ as many times as possible.”
So there you have it: Associated Content and their ilk may be the first media written for algorithms, not people.
Ronsenberg concludes that the result of this “is consequential for all of us.” I say writing for algorithms is the best way to dumb-down the state of media overall.
