How PR Web Is Strangling the Web with a Daily Flood of Crap

It’s becoming ever-harder to find actual real things on the Internet. How can you learn by way of search about, say, canine diabetes, when you can’t predict or tell which result is a spam farm and which is a labor of love? Here’s a pretty impressive look at how PR Web is undermining search results and gaming Google News and propagating what is essentially spam throughout the Internet. (In this instance, a company used PR Web for pretty obvious market manipulation — and it didn’t even work. LOL.) Two things are gross about that: First, it doesn’t even help PR Web’s clients get Google-rated inbound links. It’s not actually a great product for its users. Except that mid-level company execs can report that they got “all this attention” or “243 pickups” to their press release, and then they get to go to a lunch lunch and keep their job for another day. But worse: it’s terrible watching actual real newspaper websites get paid sad amounts of money to run garbage press releases that clog up the Internet more each day. The Internet is a real dark and messy and commerce-oriented place these days, and it’s not getting much better. (Still, imagine what it’d be like if Google didn’t retain a small army of people fighting against people trying to game the system!) (via)