Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Google Page Creator fills with crap

Philipp Lenssen reports that, just a month after launch, Google Page Creator has filled with spam and crap.

See also my previous post, "Google Base and getting the crap out".

[via Nathan and John]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm...I think I see a trend here: Google releases a product, then people fill it with spam and other junk. I think part of the problem is Google's refusal to use community policing - did Yahoo Answers fill up with spam like this?

mb said...

So far, Google Page Creator has much less crap than Google Base. In fact, according to Google, Pages has 14 crap entries vs. 1145 for Base.

Pages crap: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agooglepages.com+crap

Base crap: http://base.google.com/base/search?q=crap&authorid=&hl=en

But seriously, I have seen Google aggressively getting the crap out of Base. They found and deleted the bio of Eric Schmidt (http://www.buygoogle.com/2005/11/keeping-crap-out-of-google-base.html), and two weeks ago they invalidated the test upload I'd done of all US Senators and Representatives.

And products pages in Base automatically expire after 31 days unless they're refreshed - so at least it takes some effort and attention to keep spammy stuff online.

Anonymous said...

I think this was bound to happen. The idea of Base to be a store of content that gets structured was good, but tough to see it happen today.

I think its important to see the user's default way of doing things and non-intrusively introduce a service that makes it easier for the user to do the same activity. Lets say for classified, all interested users want to post on the leading classifieds sites. If Base allowed users to treat it as a basecamp where they add a listing and based on what it was for, if they allowed auto posting on the most qualified sites, it would serve the purpose so much better. And it can be evolved further from there on, while the data also resides in Base and is structured.