Saturday, June 04, 2005

Spom?

I was using Google to do some research at work the other day, and I noticed that whatever I searched for I got lots of useless results from the likes of eopinions.com and bizrate.com. In fact, for some searches, the pollution of off-topic search sites was so high that I found nothing useful in the first few pages of search.

Personally, I have found sites like eopinions.com and bizrate.com to be completely worthless, even when I am looking to buy something. Whatever I am looking for they seem to offer something slightly different and whatever they present is jumbled and difficult to comprehend. The Google sponsored links are on target, easy to digest and much more likely to be useful than any of these sites.

The problem is that the usefulness of internet search is being destroyed by these sites. So can we do about it? The first step in any campaign is to name the enemy. I propose we call it Spom. We have Spam polluting our email and Spim polluting instant messaging, so Spom polluting searches seems to fit. We could even explain it by saying that SPOM is the contraction of Search POlution Menace. Well it is a bit forced, but it will do. Finally Spom is so far unused (mostly).

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