oddsod - 1:05 pm on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

There are two distinct questions. The question of whether they are useful or not is something that everybody seems largely to agree on.

now I'm looking at the top 10 for that keyword, how would it help me to click on their site...

It wouldn't help you but here's the crunch: You shouldn't be getting their site in the top ten results. That's something Google is going to have to work on. What's pathetic is that they've had lots of time to clean their SERPs of the scraper rubbish but seem to have chosen not to do so.

Why? The obvious answer is "because Google makes money from ads". While that is the typical Google basher answer the truth lies deeper. You think they like scrapers in the top ten? No, they don't. But they can't justify removing a site that provides exactly what they do i.e. snippets of other sites.

Webmasters can do whatever they want with their sites, like you and i do whatever we want with our sites. If we choose to make scrapers of them that's entirely upto us. If Google then crawls that site and figures it's a top ten... blame that on the poor algo. Google also gets tripped up by cloaking, redirections, inflated links, keyword stuffing. Does that make it immoral, stupid, deceptive or unkind of you to use those tricks? No. They are all legal. What about having a desc or keyword meta tag that's too long? It's your site dammit. Do what you want with it. And it's upto Google to work out the good results for its visitors and, more importantly, to detect the cr*p because people will always try to get cr*p in.