SAN JOSE, Calif. — Facing stinging criticism about the quality of its search results, Google late Thursday made a significant change to its search engine to try to combat the growing number of websites that exist primarily to land high on its rankings.
These "content farms" and other websites that produce low-quality content were damaging the usefulness of Google's search results, many outside experts charged.
What Google called "a major improvement" was designed to highlight sites with high-quality content and will noticeably affect about 12 percent of all U.S. searches. It is also a clear signal that the company was also concerned about the problem. Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who is in charge of Google's search algorithm, said that Google recognized the problem more than 15 months ago, and has been working on a solution long before the current wave of criticism.
It's too soon to know whether the change will be enough to silence critics, some of whom said before the change was announced that Google has not fought hard enough against these sites because it shares in the advertising revenue they generate.
"This is probably about the worst I've ever seen it," Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said of the complaints about Google's search quality. "This does feel fairly unprecedented."
Critics include Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley; Michael Arrington, founder of the TechCrunch blog; and researchers at the University of London. Google is dominant in search in North America and much of Europe, with the criticism appearing not to have a significant impact on its market share. And the company fired back at critics who have said it has not been doing enough to keep the interests of advertisers and users separate.
"I'm absolutely concerned about that perception because it could not be further from the truth," Matt Cutts, Google principal engineer, said in an e-mail to the Mercury News.
Critics like Wadhwa accused Google of not doing enough to stop content farms from manipulating its search results. When some people invariably click on those results, they go to pages that often include Google text or display ads, Web traffic with the potential to earn revenue for the website — and for Google. In that scenario, Google is not just allowing poor content, it is directly profiting from it.
A large share of the search company's profit, said Wadhwa, a researcher and writer who specializes in entrepreneurship, education, software development and is also affiliated with Duke University and Harvard Law School, "is coming from this spam."
Reached after Google announced the change, Wadhwa said he has been very critical about Google's efforts to stop content farms because Google has an inherent conflict. But he said he thought Google's response showed that the company is serious about fixing the problem, and is doing many of the right things.
