As tweeted by New Scientist:

How Google and Bing beat the content farms to make your searches better http://bit.ly/uXtcw5.

Full URL is http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228436.200-inside-search-engines-war-on-bad-results.html

ANYONE can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn’t; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites.

Search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knock-offs, but even they get overwhelmed. As recently as March, for example, the first 10 results from a Google search for “how to organise your desktop” contained nine links to pages churned out by “content farms” – websites that publish reams of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars.

That prompted New Scientist to ask computer scientistRichard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow, UK, to look into the issue. The results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory in the fight against such content farms. In the process they may have inflicted serious pain on two organisations often cited as providers of content farm material: Seed, a project from AOL, appears to have stopped commissioning content from freelance writers, though the firm declined to comment. And Santa Monica-based Demand Media has seen its stock price fall by over 50 per cent since it went public earlier this year for $1.5 billion.