Last night, I did a Google ($GOOG) search for “What time is the Super Bowl kick off?”
The top response was from The Examiner and a news story entitled, What Time is the 2011 Super Bowl Kick Off: Super Bowl Sunday is Here. I quote the first paragraph of the article:
What time does the 2011 Super Bowl start on Sunday, February 6? That is the big question according to the Google trends, with NFL fans searching for superbowl kickoff time, super bowl time, Super Bowl XLV kick off time so know what time to tune in to FOX for the big game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers.
Well, it looks a lot like Ms. Miller and the Examiner’s intent with this article was to survey popular Google searches and then to write an article that would get lots of hits while leveraging the Google juice the Examiner has already built.
Her reference to Google trends in the first paragraph quoted above is a nice touch.
But make no mistake, the content farms are a gargantuan search arbitrage.
There is huge inefficiency in search and content farms are expert and getting better at gaming this inefficiency.
What some might not realize though, as those who bid $DMD on its first day of trading attest, is that the mispricing of assets eventually get squeezed out of the market. The process often takes longer than insightful people might believe possible and sometimes the inefficiencies even increase to absurd levels before reverting but eventually they do indeed approach rational value.
There is an endless stream of new content being created, scraped and stolen that is tailoring itself to search results and this trend is accelerating.
Search inefficincy is becoming a crowded trade.
Eventually, Google will have no choice but to tweak its search algorithm or it will face competition from other search companies that are better dealing with the content assualt.
Recently, Blekko announced that it would not include eHow (a content farm owned by $DMD) in its results. Presently, this is meaningless to Google as no one knows about or cares much about Blekko. But there is symbolic meaning and at some point competitors to Google and Bing will gain ground as the content farms continue to add pollution to search results.
(My gut is that social search will be the one to force the changes to traditional search but that is a post for another day.)
The process will take a while. First off, Google has a gargantuan lead, does a lot of things brilliantly and still provides, for the most part, very high quality search results. Second, Google earns money from the farms and so has an economic incentive to resist change.
Nevertheless, the dominant search engines will slowly be forced to tweak their algorithms because the content assault will only continue to increase exponentially as ever more farmers claim their 40 acres and a mule and as existing ones continue to harvest page views.
I am guessing 18-24 months but things are changing very quickly in the online publishing space as the $AOL – Huffington Post deal attests. Perhaps the search arbitrage gets squeezed much more quickly.
Special thanks to my friend Greg Battle who provoked me and helped me sift and focus these thoughts.
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