Tell Google What You Think About Junk Search Results, Boomers

There has been a lot of talk lately about how Google is changing its search algorithm to get rid of some of the “junk” that pops up near the top of the list in many searches. Take a look at this article on CNN or this one on ZDNet. While some websites are adversely affected by any tweaking Google does, I will certainly welcome this change.

After all, Google made its reputation by serving more accurate search results than those other guys. The company definitely needs to keep up with the times and make sure that it delivers relevant results, or people will flee to search engines that will.

Recently, I searched for something and one of the top five sites listed in the results was basically gibberish. Now that Google made the change, I really wish I had saved the search to compare it to the "new" one. The result web site had the keywords I had searched on, but they were embedded in a sea of junk returns. It was just a waste of my time. I bet you’ve had the same experience and wondered why Google wasn’t doing anything about it.

Well, finally it is.

One of the changes Google made is removing results from so-called "content farms" from its lists. I don’t know if you Boomers are aware of the concept of content farms, but here it is. Some bright soul figured out that writers (and in some case robots) could create "news" articles that would rise to the top of the search listings by looking at what people search for, and then creating an article that includes as many of those key words as possible.

The content farm stories have legit headlines, so people click on them. When you get to the web site, you find content that is very low quality and looks like it was strung together from a number of different places. Kudos to Google for taking on content farms and putting them in their place.

But here's the rub: some "content farms" are better than others. Some publish garbage and others take search engine results and popular keywords and actually use freelance writers to create something meaningful. Here is a list of  web sites that were affected by the change in the algorithm according to Sistrix and reported by ReadWriteWeb. 

Google has taken another step as well.  To explain this, I’ll have to explain the concept of a web browser. When you get a computer, it usually comes with a program you can use to explore the web. Mac users get Safari preinstalled. Windows users get Windows Internet Explorer. Several other companies offer browsers anyone can download for their computer. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are examples.

While a browser lets you explore by typing in web addresses, sometimes it comes equipped with its own search bar, powered by a search engine. Most of the time that search engine is Google or you can access Google search by typing http://www.google.com in your web browser. Sometimes the preinstalled search engine will be Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. You can get to Bing by typing in http://www.bing.com.  Because Chrome is a Google product, it is particularly well integrated with that particular search engine.

Now Chrome users can get a plug-in, a little program to download from the website, that lets them report back to Google when sites deliver poor content or content that doesn’t match the search query. Derek Gorden says on Search Insiders:

“An important factor in all this is a new plug-in for the Chrome browser that enables users to block sites they feel do not deliver quality content relevant to the search query.  The Personal Blocklist, which is available for free in the Chrome Web Store, shows up as a little red hand icon at the far right of the Chrome browser bar -- one quick click sends a message to Google that you didn't care for the content in a site listed in a search result.”

Certainly, you’ll be doing Google’s work for them, and I know a lot of us think that Google, with its billions, should be smart enough to catch these sites on their own. However, this is a clever example of what is called “crowdsourcing,” getting a lot of data from a lot of anonymous people to improve a product. I think Google’s search can use some improvement. I usually use Firefox as my browser, but I am considering using Chrome just so I can tell Google what I think.

In the mean time, take a look at your search results the next time you use Google. Are they better than they used to be? Are you delighted?  Or are you ready to change to Bing? Go back in time to "Yahoo?" Try out some new search engines like DuckDuckGo?

Facebook Privacy--What it means for Boomers

Facebook changed its privacy policy this week, and basically reset everyone's privacy settings so that everyone can see everything you post. And Friends of Friends can see your photos.  If you click here, you will be sent to an excellent blog post by Brian Krebbs at the Washington Post that explains exactly what Facebook did. (Warning: you  may have to close an ad before you can be linked to the blog. It's annoying but worth it.) 

I don't intend to go over the same material Krebbs covered in this blog post. I only want to warn my fellow Boomers, especially the ones who are only occasional users of Facebook, to get in there and check your privacy settings immediately. I think that Boomers have an expectation of privacy that the younger generations who have grown up with social networking don't share. Yet, we have to expect that everything we put on the web will be fodder for some search engine sometime in the future, unless we protect it.

Do you really want Google or Bing pulling up posts you made to update your status? Take something innocent, like a post about a sick member of the family. Once that post is available to be indexed by Bing or Google, it is on the web for posterity, my friends. Your birthday is another example. If you let Facebook make this information public, then you are inviting marketers into your life. This blog article by Kaila Colbin shows how Facebook's decision to pull the privacy rug out from under its users is motivated by the the ability to sell the information it is collecting on us. I understand there are many ways that marketers can get this information anyway, but why make it easy to be a target for them?  The only way to protect your information is to make sure you keep your privacy settings updated.

Like many of my Boomer friends, I use Facebook to keep up with family and friends. I'm not interested in cultivating a vast number of friends of friends. And I am angry with Facebook for resetting my privacy settings --really without much notice. Frankly, I think they should have used my old settings as the default, and asked me to opt in to their new settings, which I would have refused.

Also, there should have been more notice given. While there was a big banner telling me to update my settings when I signed on last week, the keepers of the Facebook community didn't email me, and believe me, they have my email address. We all should have been warned before they made this huge change.