Black Hats, Farms, and Bubbles: How Emerging Marketing and Content Production Models are Making Research More Difficult (And What You And Your Students Can Do About It)

Black Hats, Farms, and Bubbles: How Emerging Marketing and Content Production Models are Making Research More Difficult (And What You And Your Students Can Do About It)

Google, and other search engines, have made tremendous progress organizing the world’s knowledge. However, accessing that knowledge is becoming increasingly difficult because of emerging marketing and content production models utilized by high-ranking sites like eHow.com and ExpertVillage.com. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), "content farms" and Google's increasingly personalized search algorithms are making search engines less effective as academic research tools. For example, “black hat” Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a dubious set of techniques that intentionally deceive users and search engines to overvalue some site’s relevance and content, have become common practice on the Web. “Content farms,” that pay freelance writers to churn out low-quality content based on search engine keywords have begun outnumbering more reputable sources in search results. Research suggests that these emerging information challenges are creating problems for college students. Studies have shown that students only explore the first few search engines results regardless of quality. Project Information Literacy research concluded that students are reluctant to try new search strategies. Therefore students are exposed to more shallow, low quality results than ever before. In this session, learn more about the technologies behind these emerging marketing and content production models. Learn strategies faculty, students, and librarians can use to respond to new information environment.


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