Writing this is painful. It feels like that time I had to put Fluffy down because he had bowel cancer, and I had to do it with the blunt-trauma-inducing lovingkindness of a shovel because I couldn't afford to take him to a vet. Google is like an old lover to me, and I hate the odd feeling that I am announcing the end of an era. But here goes nothing.
Folks, I have an announcement to make.
I love porn. Don't get me wrong, here; porn is a part of my everyday life. But porn spam is, alas, another matter entirely; and it appears that Google has succumbed to it.
Fleeing the porn-spam hell that was just about any other search engine back in 1999, I joined the first wave of public Google users. Google was fast. Google was clean. Google gave great results — hell, Google gave results, period. Thin was in with a light-weight, fast-loading design that contrasted sharply with the top-heavy bandwidth wasters popular both then and now. "I'm Feeling Lucky" came to mean that you might actually avoid sex, if sex wasn't what you were searching for.
I first noticed spam in Google results in 2001. But until relatively recently, it was a minor irritation. It looks like the spammers have finally caught up with Google.
Take a recent example. As Rachel stares down an upcoming scheduled bout of the periodic crotch-bleeding that defines femininity, she whines to me that she wants some period porn. (Ask her, not me.) Very well; she's bitchy and PMSing, but I love her and will try to satisfy her twisted needs.
Thinking logically, I hope over to Google and type in "menstruation pornography" (with the quotes). I immediately see that the situation is doubleplusungood. Mainly out of morbid curiosity, I skim seven full pages of completely irrelevant automated porn spam. It's like watching maggots poke through Google's skin and wiggle their white little heads at me, impudent at their invulnerability to being zeroed.
The bottom line? Not one relevant search result. That's right: Google's search function puked out a massive amount of spam and left me with nothing, zip, nada. I was not left entirely bereft of hot menstruating girls, however; a smallish-looking fetish site that had bought an AdWords spot promised to give me exactly what I sought.
This reeks of the bad old days of nine-figure boo.com market caps, back when pundits crooned from the rooftops about how pay-for-placement search was going to make every loser rich. We're right back to square one, folks, and we might as well not even have free-for-all search engines at all. Pay for play or rot in obscurity; only those with the budget and man-hours for advertising campaigns will get noticed. Granted, AdWords lowers the bar into the reach of Menstruation Sex Studio and other folks who probably don't have multi-million-dollar ad budgets and expensive Madison Avenue agencies. But still, the obscure little site with neither profit motive nor profits will never get noticed.
Later, while making a rare pop-culture reference in my epitaph for Saddam Hussein, I had a hankering to read the actual lyrics of the Southpark "Uncle Fucker" song. (My memory was fuzzy on the "boner-biting bastard" line, if you must know.) Without a second thought, I pulled up my trusty Google page and tapped in the simplistic search query, "uncle fucker lyrics" (sans quotes). Three years ago, I'd give better-than-even odds that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button would have worked its magic; today, the first three results and 80% of the first page were unabashed porn spam.
<gay-valley-boy-blonde>Excuse me, but that is so AltaVista-in-'99.</gay-valley-boy-blonde>
Then there's the issue of quality of results. Pagerank is supposed to sift through the bazillion different pages relevant to any subject and pull the best ones to the top. But alas, Pagerank has lost its touch: Adding insult to injury, neither of the two relevant first-page results had the "boner-biting bastard" line I sought.
And porn-spam isn't the only problem. Non-pornographic Googlespam has taken over many obscure non-pornographic search queries.
Awhile back, I did a search for a "portable laser printer" (without the quotes). Several first-page results are pure, robot-driven spam; most of the others were non-spam ads, benign in commercial intent yet irrelevant nonetheless.
Now, I was wondering if such an animal as a portable laser printer even existed, given the severe engineering issues in building one at a reasonable cost; and Google used to boast a stellar ability at answering obscure questions such as this. I'm sure that if I tried the FAQ trick or something else out of my bag o' Rad Google Skillz, I'd have a fighting chance of eventually finding my answer. But the necessity of special technique demolishes Google's crown as the king of high-quality answers to simple queries about lesser-known matters. Yeah, I do remember the days of using long strings of dead-chicken-waving with Boolean operators to try to shut out the waves of search engine spam; long strings of abstruse Google incantations are even worse.
There's also the issue of fairness. Good content shouldn't need a SEO to get noticed, and a good SEO shouldn't be able to get spamming shitheads bad content good search-engine placement. PageRank used to be about fairness; but fruitless tweaks notwithstanding, PageRank is, at its heart, a democracy. All democracies eventually decay under the weight of human corruption, and Google's has had a half-life measurable in old-fashioned Internet time.
Given my recent experience, I'd guesstimate that a statistically significant percentage of Google's once-vaunted database is pure dross. Spammers play a never-ending push-down/pop-up cat-and-mouse game with the propeller-heads at the Googleplex, laughing in the face of PR0 as they spew untold masses of robotically-generated crosslinkage straight into the Googlebot's hungry maw. In the meantime, the small site creator who labors for endless late nights HTMLizing obscure subjects is creating valuable content in vain. Whereas Google once provided incomparable service for finding the obscurest of queries in the nameless corners of the Internet, obscure queries now garner spam results while obscure yet valuable content isn't even kept in the index. (If you've created a new website recently, you know what I'm talking about.)</sour-grapes>
Going back to my menstruation search, the aforementioned Menstruation Sex Studio site had 100% relevancy to my query. It should have been on the first page — probably with other sites that I don't know about because they didn't buy AdWords — but it didn't even come up at all. Instead, I got seven pages of spam.
So is this really it? Am I finally parting ways with Google forever?
Nahhh. I was just fucking with ya (or, more precisely, speaking in hype). Of course I'll continue to lean heavily on Google as a major source for web-searching goodness. But Google shall no longer enjoy my near-exclusive attention. Beyond possession of the biggest brand name on the Internet, Google is no longer special; it's just part of the pack, another lonely streetwalker looking to reel me in for the odd 15 minutes of pleasure.
As a bona fide Google addict, I have long had a relationship that approached search monogamy. I'd occasionally turn to other sources; but these were yet brief excursions, guilty quickies on the rare occasion Google could not or would not fulfill my needs. Now, I'll be playing the field. It's time to see some good old-fashioned meritocratic-capitalist competition.
Overture, here I come! Inktomi, part thy legs for some sweet, sweet results-oriented loving! Northern Light, prepare to shine for my return to your open arms! Google, my balls are no longer yours alone! (Er, eyeballs, that is.) Long have I loved thee, and sweet sorrow is this day of parting.
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