physics - 10:21 pm on Feb 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

"Sites of this type have always been controversial," said Daniel Ruby, research director at Chitika, Inc. a search advertising analytics company. "On one hand, they often do produce extremely informative, well-written articles. On the other hand, they put out countless articles on a daily basis, and some claim they exist only to generate the top result on as many keywords as possible."

This was an interesting quote. If you replace the word "they" with "printed daily newspapers" does it not still make some amount of sense (except instead of "the top result on as many keywords" it would be "so that they can fill out the paper and place more ads on each newspaper page").
Obviously that wouldn't apply to straight scraper sites, but might apply to some of the 'low quality' sites.
Just saying that I've seen some pretty sad excuses for newspapers around that don't do much other than grab AP articles and write fluff pieces just to fill the pages.
My point isn't that this is good - just that these sort of low-quality-content-mills have been around since before the internet and Google.

[edited by: physics at 10:22 pm (utc) on Feb 27, 2011]