Recently I was looking for an image bookmarking tool—something I could use to quickly save and organize images I find on the Web, in the way similar to how Delicious and Diigo save my Web sites. So I searched for the phrase “image bookmarking” on Google, and was, of course, faced with about 6,550,000 results. I was familiar with the top result and knew it wasn’t what I was looking for, so I tried the second site.
It’s easy to think that any site found in the top two results on Google is a good site; “good” meaning it provides the information it claims to, and is popular among Google users looking for the same information.
The site I found was not good. There were no clear directions about how to use it, all of the informational pages said “coming soon,” and there were very few users. Instead of providing any useful information about the site, there was a list of outbound links to Web sites that were unrelated to image bookmarking. To top it all off, I decided to explore the page of popular images and encountered an offensive pornographic image. That really pushed me over the edge.
Why should I waste time investigating a site that only has enough information to make me think it might be real? And again, this was the SECOND Google result.
If you find Web sites like this in a Google query, you can report them as spam. You need to fill out a form that requires the search term you entered and the URL for the result page. If you have access to Google Webmasters Tools, make your complaint that way—they take those reports more seriously than anonymous reports and will react quicker.
You can also report search engine spam to Yahoo and MSN.
Visit findingDulcinea to read about other suspicious sites, and learn how to determine the quality of Web sites yourself.
Katie Hartsough
Audience Development & Interaction
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