Google is not the web
2006-12-04 16:11:03.707056+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments
Two this morning have me thinking a bit about advertising, weblogs, and online content. Making Light: I am not content; I am a human being raises outrage at the recent spate of new companies aimed at paying for comment spam. Anti-news, I know of several such companies that have been around for years, the fact that some are getting a little play right now changes nothing.
Rafe talks about turning down $1.5k/year from advertisers looking for PageRank: "To make a long story short, I'm not taking the money. I love the Web too much to take money to improve the search engine rankings of spammers."
I've seen these arguments before, and I was almost swayed by them, but... Google is not the web. Let us not confuse our love for "the web" with the people who have brought us this mess (and are profiting handsomely from it). There are plenty of ways to fix this problem, and Google has decided that pushing this back on us is the right solution.
Maybe now if people see how broken this all has become we can get some competence back in search.