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Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories
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by Paula J. Hane
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The blogosphere and media outlets have been abuzz lately with reports of low-quality search results from the major search engines. It started in December 2010 with a New York Times, story about an unscrupulous merchant whose bad treatment of customers and negative reviews pushed the site to prominence in Google searches. In response to the flap that arose, Google quickly addressed this with changes to its search algorithms. Since then, there have been a New York Times expose of J.C. Penney's SEO practices ("The Dirty Little Secrets of Search") and Google's subsequent changes to its algorithm, Google's assertion that Microsoft Bing was copying Google search results, Google's banning of spam from low-quality sites and so-called "content farms," and even a conspiracy theory about which company was launching a negative publicity campaign against Google. This has indeed been a wild and crazy time.
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Credo Reference Expands M.E. Sharpe Content
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Credo Reference signed an agreement to expand the M.E. Sharpe content offered on the Credo Reference platform. Researchers will now have access to the added content as a Credo Reference Publisher Collection and the forthcoming Subject Collections.
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EBSCO Discovery Service Boosts STM Content With IGI Global Agreement
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IGI Global journals and reference books will be searchable via EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). An agreement between EBSCO Publishing and IGI Global will allow metadata for 131 journals and more than 1,500 reference books to be added to the Base Index of EDS.
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New Pew Research Center Report: Local News Is Going Mobile
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The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism released a new report on people using mobile devices—smartphones and tablets—to get local news and information. The report, "How mobile devices are changing community information environments," says that local news is going mobile. Nearly half of all American adults (47%) report that they get at least some local news and information on their cell phone or tablet computer.
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SaferProducts.gov: A New World for Consumers, Businesses, and Researchers
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by Peggy Garvin
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SaferProducts.gov, a new government database of consumer product safety complaints and manufacturer responses, has been controversial from its earliest stages. When the database officially launched this month, some businesses and trade associations renewed their calls for closing, postponing, or modifying it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a 2010 letter to the Senate, said the database "will lead to consumer confusion and give rise to lawsuits based on a rumor repeated through the echo chamber of the Internet." On the other hand, on its website ConsumerReports.org called SaferProducts.gov "a major milestone that will empower consumers not only to learn about the safety complaints on the products they own, but to file their own complaints to warn other consumers."
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