Hmmm...maybe that doesn't scan so well as Oliver Stone's heavy-handed commentary... Dang.
Anyhoo.
Last night, while mixing teriaki marinade and paring beef for homemade jerky, Dennis mentioned the latest high-profile results-jacking busted by Google.*
Dennis suggested the incident as good blog fodder. At first, I was a little skeptical, thinking that we--by which I mean I/T folks--are pretty jaded about the cat-and-mouse arms race played by Google and legions of SEO mountebanks. (By the bye: I'm not actually mixing metaphors here; in the hands of a talented artist like Jeff DeBoer, a cat and mouse arms race can be both awe-inspiring and absolutely delightful.)
I do recommend reading the full five pages of the original New York Times expose, simply for their peek into the shadows of the world of link-farming--and, more aptly, why you should at least skim past the first link. But for me, the real takeaway is that, while software is key to boosting the signal-to-noise ratio (which is to say, a search engine's bread & butter, beer and pizza, burger & fries, hummus & pita, yadayadayada) ultimately, human intervention is a non-negotiable part of the business model. (If you read the PayPal chapter in Founders at Work, you'll notice the same schtick in the anti-fraud dept.)
And that's maybe the lesson that the "everyone" implied by the link-farmer interviewed in the NYT article should take to heart.
- - - - -
* Welcome to Valentine's Day in a dual-geek marriage. Knowing me, I was playing with banana chips--products of the same dehydrator--to see how far I could fold them over between my molars before they actually snapped and I had to crunch them out of their misery.
