It seems like just about everyone I know writes a blog these days. As most of us know, some blogs are better than others and various methods are used by search engines to differentiate between mediocre and quality content about a particular subject.
At this point, humans are winning the battle simply because it is very difficult for artificial intelligence to properly understand the difference in quality between multiple articles that cover the same topic. The engineers at Yahoo! Labs are attempting to change this with their Content Optimization project.
One dilemma that search engine companies face today is the issue of speed vs. quality.
With the vast amount of content out on the Internet and especially in the blagosphere, the best way to sift through the dirt to get to the gems is by using human editors to pick and choose what they feel is quality content.
Blog and article search engines such as Technorati and E-zines do this exact same thing. By setting up an editorial barrier, it serves two purposes. The first purpose is that the blogger has to manually submit the articles to the blog search engine site. That helps to filter out much of the content to edit. Secondly, these editors are paid to edit an article not only for proper use of English but also to determine if the article will be valuable and interesting to readers. The result is higher quality and interesting articles for readers.
Some obvious downsides to this human-driven process are that these search engine companies have to pay for people to edit hundreds or even thousands of articles per day. It also severely slows down the publishing date and time of a submitted article. If the material is time sensitive, than the article can lose some or all of its value.
Article first published as Yahoo! Labs Attempts to Deliver Personalized Content on Technorati.
