Google Trends revolutionized the Internet because everyone got to find out what people were searching. It became a nice way of finding out about news that might be breaking but not quite.
This, unfortunately, became a Catch-22 situation because helpful, awesome sites (like us!) can use SEO to reach a broader audience and that’s good for everyone and yet it became a way for spam sites to pummel your search results with utterly worthless information.
Sometimes, it’s not a big deal, like when you search for news about Jerry Sloan, who just resigned as head coach of the Utah Jazz. You get Google News results for Yahoo! Sports, ESPN and CBSSports.com. That’s the stuff you want to be reading, and there’s no chance that shoddy spam bloggers can infiltrate the first page of Sloan’s search results.
This becomes entirely more problematic when you’re looking for something a little more obscure, like, say, information about the 17-year-old with whom Mark Sanchez was getting his freak on. That’s because there’s a chance you might search for something like “Sanchez 17-year-old,” which happens to be the eighth-most popular search on Thursday.
In case you’re not aware, crap like Entoogle.com (OMFG I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT I WROTE FOR THEM!), Babble.com, RealEstateRadioUSA.com and Khabrein.info (which has an entry title, “Mozilla Firefox 4 beta 11 and Mark Sanchez 17 year old girl friend,” SMDH) pollute your ability to find useful information by whoring out to whatever Google is finding.
There are also content farms that stem from people with tons of money (Bleacher Report stands out in the sports realm) that don’t provide the substance you want when you search for “Jenn Sterger,” unless you’re actually looking for a 10-picture slideshow that explains why the Brett Favre scandal is awesome for her.
Using that as an example, let’s (finally!) get down to business and figure out how to search for something without having to wade through a pile of crap. First, search for whatever you want, in this case Jenn Sterger.
Okay, see that purple link at the bottom? That’s probably not relevant to you, unless you love pointless slideshow explanations with intermittent newsletter pop-ups. So, let’s say you hate B/R and want them to die a slow death get out of your SEO results. Why don’t you try searching with this term — “jenn sterger -inurl:(bleacherreport)” — instead?
BAM!
Adios, amigos. But wait, there’s more! Maybe you think that Deadspin is a vile group of smut-peddling dirtbags. (You may be correct, or you may not be. That’s your opinion.) And as a result, you don’t want to read what they’re spitting. How about you try and search for … THIS! Er, this: “jenn sterger -inurl:(bleacherreport|deadspin)”
In case you haven’t figured it out, the “-inurl(sitename|sitename|sitename)” command basically filters what you don’t want out of your Google results.
You might hate Entoogle, you might hate Bleacher Report and, hell, you might hate WillBrinson.com. Whatever. I’m not offended, because I get a bajillion hits a day anyway, loser.
And yes, there’s a downside to this. Namely, having to type that little “-inurl (sitenameyouhate)” after your search results. But what I recommend doing is building up a list of terrible sites you never want to see again and saving them as text document using either Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Mac). Whenever you start searching stuff, pop it open and copy it into the window. It’s a little bit of extra work but it’s certainly not as tedious as wading through the muck of results that you can end up dealing with on a normal basis.
Either way, you’re now armed and prepared to go forth and find out what porn star is having sex with which famous person, all while avoiding spam sites with Google’s search.
Lord knows they won’t be fixing it any time soon — especially since all those peddlers of worthless information just so happen to use Google Ads anyway.
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