In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at - Demand Media alone pumps out 4,000 new pieces of content every day . The solution is of course for Google and other search engines to find better ways to surface quality content , whether that be from traditional news media, blogs or even Demand Media ( not all of its content is poor quality ). So how can Google evolve to identify quality content better? Sponsor Quality! Pah, Does Google Need to Bother? Perhaps we should first answer the question: why should Google be worried about the quality issue? After all, it has a virtual monopoly on the search market. The obvious and PR answer is that Google wants to provide the best search results possible for its users. But there is another big reason why Google needs to do something. So-called "quality" content providers are already well advanced in routing around Google, or at least making them less relevant. As I wrote yesterday, Reuters is onto something with its subscription business model. According to Chris Ahearn , President of Media at Thomson Reuters, the company already makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Reuters also provides services as well as just content. Bloomberg is another leading media company finding success with this strategy. The subscription model is making inroads, because the users themselves are flocking to it. A prime example comes from VC Paul Kedrosky , who became frustrated after doing various Google searches for "dishwasher reviews" and getting unsatisfactory results. He says that this has made him "more willing to pay for things" - in that case a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers. As Kedrosky archly noted, "the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high." What Google Can Do Google surely knows that quality (or lack thereof) in its index is a problem. As one part of the solution, Google is currently experimenting with real-time search results from social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook. The theory is that users are more likely to get timely, relevant results by tapping into their social network. That's all well and good, but real-time search is unlikely to give you better results on the dishwasher search and other topic-focused search queries. So what else can Google do to identify and surface quality material? Some readers in Sunday's post (Tadhg, Charles Coxhead and others) argued that Google's current algorithm accounts for quality well enough, through the link economy. But many others thought that Google must improve its ranking of quality. Here were some of our readers' suggestions: Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn , who further wrote that "the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem." Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky's post on "Algorithmic Authority." Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli. Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger . Special curation and algorithms on top of that; William Mougayar, whose company Eqentia does precisely that. p2p recommendation (i.e. filtering through your peers); Nick Taylor . Capture engagement data; Mark Littlewood . Give special weightings to categories of content, e.g. content farms, social media bookmarks blogs and Twitter; Aaron Savage . Use anti-spam type software to identify content that makes too much use of keywords; Barry . Track reputation against authors rather than URLs - a 'PageRank for People'; Marshall Clark . These are all great ideas. Google is almost certainly already doing some of these things already - as will other search companies. John Battelle is expecting a "major breakthrough" in search in 2010 and I hope he's right. One thing is for sure, Google will need to do more in 2010 if it's to stay ahead of the content farms and continue to surface quality content for its millions of users. Discuss

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How Google Can Combat Content Farms

Over December we have published our best Web products of 2009 over ten posts. This week we've opened up our selections for you to vote on . The poll is embedded below and we invite you to select your favorite web products of 2009. You can vote for up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. We will announce the final top 10, along with the full results, this Friday . After one day of voting, here is the top 10: Sponsor 1 Twitter 2 Google Maps 3 Google Chrome 4 Facebook 5 Hulu 6 Adobe AIR 7 WordPress 8 TweetDeck 9 iPhone platform 10 Evernote Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Interim Results: Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Over December we have published ten Top 10 lists for the best products of 2009 , in categories ranging from Consumer Web Apps to Real-Time Technologies. Now we're opening up our selections for you to vote on. We've embedded a poll below, with all 100 products that the ReadWriteWeb team selected . We invite you to vote for your favorite web products of 2009. You can select up to 10 products. If you don't see one of your favorites in the list, note it in the comments and we'll count that as a vote too. Sponsor We will announce the top 10, along with the full results, at the end of this week. Note: the poll is randomly ordered, but you can also view an alphabetical list below. What are your best products of 2009? (multiple choice) ( polling ) Top 100 Web Products of 2009, Alphabetical Aardvark ActivityStreams Adobe AIR Amazon EC2 Android platform Appsfire Apture Arduino Basecamp BBC's Semantic Music Project Bing Blip.fm BNO (Breaking News Online) box.net Boxee Brightkite ChartBeat Cisco Collaboration Citysense Clicker Cliqset Collecta Data.gov DBpedia Echo (JS-Kit) Evernote Evri Facebook Facebook iPhone app Fedex SenseAware Feedly Fever Foursquare Freebase FreshBooks Glue Google App Engine Google Apps Google Chrome Google Maps Google Search Options and Rich Snippets Google Voice Hootsuite HP CeNSE Hulu IBM's sensor solutions ioBridge iPhone platform Jimdo Jive Software SBS 4.0 Jolicloud Layar Microsoft Windows Azure MindTouch Mint Mir:ror MOG Moshi Monsters Mozilla Raindrop New York Times APIs OneForty Open Calais OrSiSo Outside.in Pachube Posterous Postrank present.ly PubSubHubbub Rackspace Cloud Drive Regator Ribbit RSSCloud Salesforce.com Seesmic Shazam SocialCast Socialtext Spotify StockTwits Superfeedr Tornado (FriendFeed framework) Tumblr TweetDeck Tweetie Tweetmeme Twidroid Twingly Twitter Vuze Wetoku WideNoise Wikitude Wolfram Alpha Woopra WordPress Yahoo Query Language (YQL) Yelp Zemanta Zoho CRM Discuss

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Vote Now For Your Favorite Web Products of 2009

Google amazed us last week with 5 fantastic demos of innovations like Google Goggles and near instant speech-to-text mobile translation. That was before the company showed off its new real-time search , a key problem it solved with grace while its competitors floundered . Now we're told of a whole new batch of far-out search innovations that are in the works, in an interview with Google's vice-president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer in today's UK Telegraph . What are they? Translated search, social/personalized search and intuitive search . Here's what Mayer has to say about these three projects. Sponsor Translated Search See also: Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years "Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world's websites," Mayer told the Telegraph. "And then invoked the translation software a second and third time - to not only then present the results in your native language, but then translated those sites in full when you clicked through." That sounds like a great way to move beyond an internet dominated entirely by English, or to help English-only speakers cope with an internet dominated by content in other languages. It could help open up monetization to more content and it could greatly expand all our horizons. To think that a significant portion of the world's information is inaccessible because of something as almost-solvable as language differences seems like a real shame. Related: Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Website Owners Social Search and Personalization "Although we search the web right now, what we really want to do is search it as each individual user sees the web. We want Google to be the most accurate reference tool which allows people to search the web and each have an individual experience," Mayer told the Telegraph. The Telegraph's Emma Barnett identifies social network friend connections as a key part of this. "Right now Google can only include the updates and information from these networks if the users' privacy settings are 'public'," the reporter writes. "According to Mayer - the ideal will be to get access to your friend's updates in search." Mayer: "Understanding the social network structure and the permission rules around social networks status updates when they are not public - will really empower us in terms of search." Understanding the structure and permission is one thing but getting access to Facebook's social graph would be another. Have you noticed that Google doesn't leverage Facebook Connect anywhere in any of its products? So far the company's experiments with social search have been impressive if small in scope. Now that Facebook is opening up, if Google can connect with it then hundreds of millions of people could have social search placed front and center in their search experience. But if connecting Google and your Facebook social graph was a simple matter, it probably would have already happened. Microsoft, meanwhile, is a big investor in Facebook and may seek to do something similar with Bing. See also: Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs Intuitive Search Recommendation technology is something we've written about extensively here and Mayer seems to be telling the Telegraph that recommendation is going to be a big part of Google's future. Intuitive search sounds pretty far-out, but Barnett writes that it may be closer than we think. Barnett: "The ultimate prize for Mayer is intuitive search. She wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they're looking for. Amazingly she doesn't think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the 'omnivorous' search engine -i.e. one which is able to take a user's total context - where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on." Mayer: "You could have some information waiting for you when you turn on your computer or some relevant URLs forming part of your browser background (presumably if you use Chrome - Google's browser) or on your side wiki". Our take: This sounds cool but shouldn't be too surprising. Last week Google demoed a mobile search product that automatically recommends categories you might want to search for and gives you a way to find nearby restaurants, etc. with a single click. Search engines have long struggled with the limitations of human users and their abilities to explain what they want. Search queries are maddeningly short and compared to many of the other signals we emit implicitly - like location, click-stream history and more - explicit search queries are relatively rare. The future of search may very well be in semi or unprompted recommendations based largely on our implicit behavioral data. That sounds like the movie Minority Report, but it's also the direction that search companies are moving in. You didn't think Google was going to leave a Minority Report type future untouched, did you? Check out Barnett's full coverage in the Telegraph at 'An omnivorous Google is coming' . Discuss

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3 New Forms of Search That Google is Working on Now

I've been writing a lot about so-called 'content farms' in recent months - companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web. Both of those two companies are now firmly inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. , on a par with the likes of Apple and AOL. Big media, blogs and Google are all beginning to take notice. Sponsor Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, recently published an article on how journalism can survive in the Internet age. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington also riffs on this theme , mentioning AOL's "Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media" and quoting a Wired piece on Demand Media from October. I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post . I wrote then that Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. In short, it's a well-funded, well-oiled page view generating machine. In November I explored more about how Demand Media produces 4,000 pieces of content a day , based on an interview I did with the founders in September. I followed up by asking: is ad-driven content crossing a line? Low Quality, High Impact The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers. Last week I analyzed the way wikiHow produces its content - its users do all of the writing and editing for free, via a Wikipedia-like platform. There was evidence that wikiHow's model is producing better content than its Demand Media counterpart for how-to articles, eHow. More worrying though is that Demand Media is producing thousands of these types of articles a day. So is the Web becoming awash with low-quality content produced by content farms like Demand Media, Answers.com and now AOL? Yes it is. From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn't go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it "lacks soul," it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington's analogy with fast food is apt - it is content produced quickly and made to order. Can Quality Survive? Given the impact that content farms are having right now, how can producers of 'quality' content survive? Chris Ahearn from Thomson Reuters claims that journalism will "do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive." Ahearn notes that Reuters makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Plus Reuters, he says, provides "valuable services - not just content." Ahearn also implies that syndication technologies, like Reuters' semantic analysis platform Open Calais , will lead to a new kind of "B2B content network" - where content creators and publishers can easily collaborate and make money together. Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee In my view both writers and readers of content will need to work harder to get quality content. I know I'd rather read an article by The Economist on any given topic, than one generated by Demand Media. But we, as readers, need more help from Google and the other search engines. Right now 'quantity' still rules on the Web, 'quality' is hard to find. Perhaps that's why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there's something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future. Should Google be worried about that? Yes; and they are . I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms. If you thought it was bad enough that many professional blogs pump out 30 posts a day, often regurgitations of press releases or quick write-ups of "news" such as Twitter being down for a few minutes (note the irony of that tweet), this new type of Google gaming is on a far bigger scale. What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web. See also: Demand Media Is a Page View Generating Machine - And it's Working Answers.com: 31 Million Copied and Pasted Web Pages Can't Go Wrong The Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand Media How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day Ad-Driven Content - Is it Crossing The Line? Photo credit: ~Darin~ Discuss

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Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried

Google just announced that it has started to include some results from its universal search feature right into the list of suggested search terms beneath the search box. When you search for "weather in San Francisco", for example, the current weather will appear right at the bottom of the suggested search terms without having to hit the enter key. This new feature currently works for 10 universal search features, including weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions. Sponsor Google plans to enable this feature for other results based on the universal search feature in the future. Chances are that Google will also include this feature directly in Chrome. Chrome's address bar, after all, already features advanced support for suggest search terms. Also New: Quick Scroll Extension In addition, Google also announced Quick Scroll , a new Chrome extension . Once you activate Quick Scroll, a small box often appears at the bottom of a page after you click on a search result that makes it easy to find the most relevant parts of a page that relate to your search results. Quick Scroll can automatically find the most relevant content on a site based on the search you just performed and highlight the relevant part of a page. Discuss

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Find Without Searching: Google Brings Universal Search to Google Suggest

There were a ton of great products launched in 2009 by big companies and startups alike, but in this post we focus on the best products released by startups. The easiest way to become a leading product in your industry is to meet a need better than anyone else. The following ten have proven themselves with great features, substantial marketplace momentum and, most importantly, a game-changing approach to solving a problem. Sponsor ReadWriteWeb's Best Products of 2009: Real-Time Reference - Aardvark : Reinventing Q&A, ReadWriteWeb covered Aardvark's launch in March 2009 . The service allows users to ask and answer questions through a network of friends via IM, iPhone application, Twitter, email or web interface. Because the system automatically routes questions to people with the right expertise, answers are fairly accurate and there is little need to use the service's flagging system. The company claims that 90% of questions get answered in five minutes or less. Location-based Apps - Foursquare : Launched at SXSW, Foursquare is a location-based social application where users check in on their iPhone at various businesses and compete against their friend network for points. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's launch in March . Since then they've partnered with Bay Area Rapid Transit and a number of businesses to offer location-based deals to users. iPhone App Recommendation - Appsfire : In a world where iPhones seemed to saturate the earth, Appsfire offers a great way for users to share their favorites. Launched in August, ReadWriteWeb praised the convenience of the iPhone app . Four months after downloading it, many of our RWW teammates are still sharing their apps via the embeddable Appsfire widget and the iPhone application. Real-Time Search - Collecta : If you're interested in finding out the latest info on a particular product, Collecta offers real-time search with a variety of results including blog posts, photos and Twitter and Identi.ca posts. Launched in June, ReadWriteWeb covered the company's release . In September the company released its API to developers . Twitter App Discovery - OneForty : Dubbed the "unofficial Twitter app store" OneForty is a marketplace where Twitter developers add their applications for discovery. End-users can add their reviews and recommendation to be featured on the service's front page. Launched in September, Oneforty breaks down the applications into easy to understand categories and features the most popular apps and recently uploaded apps on the homepage. Next Page: Top 10 Startup Products of 2009 6-10 All-You-Can-Eat Music - MOG All Access : Although MOG has been around as a blogging network for a few years, earlier this month the company launched it's much-anticipated $5 dollar per month streaming music service. The product's unique features include a discovery bar slider where users can play streaming radio and tweak the flow of recommendations to their liking. Coupled with an iPhone app that is promised to encompass offline caching, MOG All Access is a great service rivaled only by close competitor Spotify . Web TV - Clicker : Launched in mid November Clicker is considered the TV Guide for internet television . The company indexes 400,000 full episodes from 7,000 shows and features a DVR-like playlist (including Netflix Instant Streaming and Amazon VOD) and integration with Facebook connect. Clicker also has a Boxee app that pulls in metadata for shows, channels and actors. Semantic Search - Evri : Evri is a semantic search engine with a matching algorithm that creates connections between people, products and concepts. Launched in mid-June, ReadWriteWeb first reported the product's ability to distinguish between subjects, verbs and objects to make connections . Conversation Aggregation - JS-Kit's Echo : While JS-Kit has been around for three years, the company' latest product Echo is a better iteration of blog comments. ReadWriteWeb first wrote about the product launch in July . The service allows users to embed a simple line of javascript in their blogs in order to gather a real-time stream of Diggs, Tweets, comments and reactions. Augmented Reality - Layar : ReadWriteWeb readers first got a glimpse of Layar in June . Created by SPRXmobile , the service places images and data on the mobile browser for a new form of location-based augmented reality discovery. In July SPRX released the company's first developer keys for the API and by August it had celebrated an Android release with an iPhone app to follow. The company currently has a gallery with several cool 3rd party applications. Discuss

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Top 10 Startup Products of 2009