[petervandijck]

Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem. I would expect them to make some moves faster that are smarter than banning content farm X while partnering with content farm Y. Likely algorithmically, coz that's how they roll.

[timr]

Google would do well for itself to stop horsing around with attempts to find 'algorithmic solutions' (if that's actually what they're doing), and in the short-term doing what's necessary to make a perceivable improvement in the quality of their product. Even if the content farms were changing domains regularly, Google could probably kill them faster than they'll find a way to algorithmically drop the ranking of their results, in aggregate.

For all of the recent noise that Google has been making about fixing this problem, the number of gamed search results in their index is still insanely high. Take plant diseases for example...every time I've made a search for some specific problem related to my houseplants, the results are so loaded with content-farm crap that I have to go at least a page or two in to get to reliable sources of information.

We're not even talking about relevant webspam from plant stores or online merchants...just eHow garbage, which is poorly regurgitated from the other sources that come lower in the results.

[petervandijck]

Yea, I think you're right there.

Although, perhaps we underestimate the scale they deal with. Plus, manually removing sites that are not clearly evil but on the border may become a PR nightmare.

[epi0Bauqu]

For the record, the vast majority of our content farm stuff is algorithmically based. In addition, we've made some manual blocks and since the beginning we've been promoting good content in our "Zero-click Info" boxes. Recently it has been a lot of programming stuff, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=python+split

[netdog]

> Google has mentioned they're working on the content farm problem.

The irony is that is Google's own AdSense program is the incentive for the creation of airburger web sites, which otherwise have no reason to exist.