Some influential tech voices deeply critical of today's search technology hailed the victory of IBM's Watson at Jeopardy! as a forerunner of a new type of more intelligent, useful and less spammy search. Here's why that's still an awfully long ways off.
The trouble lies in the quality of information -- a thorny problem due to the subjectivity of "quality" in general. Google keeps tweaking its algorithms, but the junk content keeps rising to the top. In the arms race against spammers, the next few years are crucial.
In a blog post on Friday, Google made its most direct warning that it would be tweaking search algorithms to punish "content farms" -- cheap producers of Web content that either copied or scraped information from other publishers. Demand Media could suffer in particular.
How much quality content can a penny buy? I trolled Demand Media's eHow.com to answer that question. Here's my collection of the dumbest articles published by the company, which recently filed for an IPO.