Google's War On Nonsense

Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system. As a business proposition, they once seemed exciting. Last year, The Economist admiringly described Associated Content and Demand Media as cleverly cynical operations that “aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it.”

by Virginia Heffernan, The New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/googles-war-on-nonsense/)