The Farmer Update Is A Mere Reshuffle, Says Blekko Founder

“They shuffled the deck, but all the cards are still the same” is Blekko founder Rich Skrenta’s response to Google’s Farmer Update. I like how anti-Google he is! In his eyes, the new search results have not improved in quality significantly. Despite Google’s updates affecting almost 12% of quries, Rich claims that most changes are minor reshuffles, for example content farms answerbag.com and eHow.com swapping positions 1 and 2 for a particular query.

See the whole interview on YouTube:

The root of the problem, he concludes, is the human trainers that Google employs to manually assess search results and website quality. These guys’ evaluations directly affect Google’s output, but Rich dismisses trainers as lowly paid and poorly qualified and Google’s reliance on them as an inherent weakness. OK, it is Rich’s job to have a go at Google, but do watch the interview for more, there are some interesting ideas.

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