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Rufus Wainwright is a surprise supporter of gay marriage, Houston, Salt Lake City and Desmond Tutu are working to end discrimination against LGBT people. An out gay wrestler has committed suicide,…
Ellen DeGeneres has a secret lesbian agenda and we never even noticed! Lady Gaga is headlining Lollapalooza, and Rachel Maddow & Susan let People Magazine into their home. Also; Wanda Sykes’ Erykah…
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Where did all the good headphones go? This’s the question that Team Audiostraddle are attempting to answer as they recommend some of the finer models of ear/headphones they’ve experienced lately. Got…
Constance McMillen continues to be f*cked over: her school sent her to a fake prom with “learning disabled” students. Also, employers are exploiting unpaid interns and it could be illegal. Why do gay…
This week in the news, Erykah Badu gets naked & fined, Slash premieres his new album and Tegan & Sara, Kelis and Hunter Valentine premiere new videos. Also in the fix: Madonna tops the pops, Evelyn…
This is not tl;dr, because it might be super long, but nothing is really too long, is it? I mean you read a lot of words in that Harry Potter book. So read this: GOOGLE IS BUTCHERING THE WRITTEN…
In short, Google runs a business, not a public utility; but does this really make sense? More and more, search engines are the way most everyone accesses information on a daily basis. We regulate the public’s access to clean water because we consider clean water an essential public good, and we understand that the commercial sector can have a dangerous influence on it. Should information not also be considered an essential public good? Imagine an open-source, completely transparent search engine, with a deep crawl powered by publicly-owned processors, or even a cloud of volunteer participants.
The important point is that the SEO structure drives many companies to create noisy, crowded, ugly Web pages filled with awkward, vacuous, and repetitive content. The game that Google facilitates—or rather, incentivizes—is simple: dump Google ads on a page and elbow it to a healthy search ranking; rinse, repeat. And if the profit incentive is to produce tons of search-engine-optimized content as quickly as possible—without any regard for the quality or even the veracity of that content—the result will inevitably be enormous, steaming piles of written shit.
The responsibility of the Web writer is becoming less about writing for a human audience and more about writing for Google’s crawler.
Wag’s Revue - Google Is Butchering The Written Word
(I was writing this essay recently precisely – about my disappointment with the way content was being presented on some lesbian or women-oriented websites I used to read; that it had stopped becoming a reader-oriented or community-oriented website but become a search-engine-oriented website and it was really hard for us to both survive and refuse to only SEO within logical reason. Anyhow READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE, clearly i am not writing mine as it pales in comparison. but please read it, it’s super super super long but really important. set some time aside)
Despite Google’s extraordinary usefulness; its friendly, intuitive design; and the fact that its slogan is “Don’t Be Evil”—which its founders love to reiterate as often as possible during interviews—the company’s central drive, as a publicly-traded corporation, is, and must be, profit.8 And it is one of the fundamental philosophical errors of our era—awash as it is with neoliberal influence and the language of economics—to conflate profit with value, or, even worse, to moralize profit, to insist the pursuit of it is a productive force that, if unadulterated, will necessarily be “not evil.” The drive for profit is no doubt a productive force, but how and what it produces is too seldom the subject of inquiry.
Hey! Have you supported your community yet today? No? Don’t worry, it’s not too late! OUTmedia is working to make you think about where your dollar is going, and we think you should help.
This week in the news, Erykah Badu gets naked & fined, Slash premieres his new album and Tegan & Sara, Kelis and Hunter Valentine premiere new videos. Also in the fix: Madonna tops the pops, Evelyn…