In 2011 a change to Google's search results ranking algorithm (Google Panda) was made aiming to lower the rank of low-quality sites know as content farms.
Over the years I have contributed to many of these so called content farms, starting with Suite101, a question and answer website that was started in 1996 and died in 2014. The effects of Google's Panda algorithm pretty much killed Suite101.
I was also a contributor to Associated Content, a site started in January 2005, and purchased by Yahoo! in 2010 and ran for a while under the name Yahoo! Voices. It was a combination of news and commentary. It also died in 2014.
I also contributed to Examiner_com for many years, a site that called itself a news website for “pro–am contributors” that tried its best to be a “real” online newspaper. It has died as well, as like many other sites it was hit hard by the Google Panda changes.
I could add a few more to the list, but hopefully you get the point that I am speaking from many personal experiences. Many of these so called content farms did have some level of editors who at time critiqued the content, which adds some merit to my complaints that Quora needs more moderation, not less.
Based on my personal experiences, compared to these other sites, is Quora a content farm. Yes, no doubt. I often wonder why Google is giving Quora a free pass by not considering it a content farm.
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In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm (or content mill) is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views,[1] as first exposed in the context of social spam.[2]
Articles in content farms have been found to contain identical passages across several media sources, leading to questions about the sites placing search engine optimization goals over factual relevance.[3] Proponents of the content farms claim that from a business perspective, traditional journalism is inefficient.[1] Content farms often commission their writers' work based on analysis of search engine queries[1] that proponents represent as “true market demand”, a feature that traditional journalism lacks.[1]
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Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. Its publisher, Quora, Inc., is based in Mountain View, California. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[4] Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[5]
Although other sites, such as Wikipedia and Stack Exchange, use crowdsourcing to identify, collapse, and filter out undesirable content, Quora has yet to implement such a system.
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Crowdsourcing was coined in 2005 as a portmanteau of crowd and outsourcing. individuals or organizations use contributions from Internet users to obtain needed services or ideas Crowdsourcing has also been used for noncommercial work and to develop common goods (e.g., Wikipedia).
People talk about what they “do” all the time — but they talk a lot less about what they actually accomplish.
About.com https://www.quora.com/topic/About-com
About.com Tries To Become Less Random
More radical still, Dotdash CEO Neil Vogel says the company will pursue a less-is-more strategy.
How different is Quora than eHow and other content farms?
How different is Quora than About.com and other content farms?
The Guru 42 Universe is not run by a university professor with a team of editors and advisers working to developing a website. Tom Peracchio is simply someone who loves technology and history and is amazed by how little people know about the great minds in the world of technology.
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