What is the difference and how should they respond? It seems to be a rising frustration among power users that Google is increasingly becoming a wasteland populated by spam. For example, Marco Arment recently commented on his podcast how hard it was to find answers to simple questions on Google these days. He was saying that the content farms have basically created a page for every PHP function with thin content and rendered it useless. For a company whose goal is to index all human information it is a pretty big warning flag.
What is the appropriate user response? Go to Stack Overflow? Find a branded knowledge base like O'Reilly's Safari? I'm genuinely curious to know what we can do.
Disagree on the PHP function thing.
For nearly all function names the php.net page is the top result, even when there is a C function of the same name.
Occasionally there is a w3schools or similar close to the top, but it's not like those guys have just wholesale ripped the docs.
I was referring to how Google should respond to content farms. Historically, Google has been willing to take manual action on webspam. With the rest of search quality and ranking, Google tries to use algorithms as much as we can. So the distinction of whether something is spam vs. low-quality is an important one within Google.
One of the reasons the searchwiki approach was a good idea. Not everyone has the same opinion, what one person found helpful another found low quality content.
What is the appropriate user response? Go to Stack Overflow? Find a branded knowledge base like O'Reilly's Safari? I'm genuinely curious to know what we can do.