There is no doubt that Google - the technology and the phenomenon - helped the internet. As the web grew they made it easier to manage, they took search seriously at a time when everyone else gave up on it, and for a while there in between web 1.0 and web 2.0, they almost single-handedly kept the hype of the internet going. But these days they have a lot to answer for.

Most significant is the fact that it's still far to easy to get lame or even completely fake pages into the index and the search results, and that they themselves help monitize these fake pages, which further encourages their creation. In other words, while Google says their goal is to provide access to the world's information, but what they are simultaneously doing is encouraging the creation of non-information on the largest scale in the history of humanity and then allowing that non-information to compromise their primary goal of clearly organizing the real information.

Nothing could prove this more clearly than this paragraph from a blog, prefectly enough, called Monitize:

Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google. And they are ranking, too. That particular domain has an Alexa ranking of under 7,000. Another domain owned by the same person, t1ps2see.com, has between 1.7 and 2.4 billion indexed pages and an Alexa ranking of under 2,000… after 4 weeks. Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking?

In english, this means that one person has created about 5 BILLION pages of essentially gibberish filled with nothing but text and links that make him money, and in less than a month become one of the top 10,000 most visited sites on the internet (according to the highly inaccurate Alexa, but it certainly means there is traffic being generated).

And he did it ONLY because Google (and I'm sure the other engines) take in his worthless pages and put them in the search results AND give him paid links to put on those pages to earn money off the people that Google sends him. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if Google may be encouraging their employees to spend 20% of their time on hobby-projects in order to slow down their progress in actually fixing these problems.

Of course, the Google Adsense monitization side of the equation isn't the only way the monitize junk pages. There are any number of networks that will pay sites for links generated from visitor clicks. And while the Monitize blog reports that Google Adense were on these pages, I can't see them now so perhaps the publicity has gotten this guy cut off. But rest assured there are hundreds if not thousands like him.

The problem has many dimension, and I'm sure there are many at Google who honestly try to police both sides of this equation. But as I'm sometimes fond of saying, the best you can do is not by definition good enough. It certainly isn't in this case.

BONUS LINK: Read about yet another way to buy links and have junk content created all over the web.

UPDATE: Google claims some of this is a counting error.