From the article:

"Content Farms like Demand Media are worth more than the New York Times, producing over a million low-quality articles for popular searches. Other sites quickly copy published content, flooding search results with just a few extremely similar pages. When I Google: “How much is spent on SEO every year?”, 8 of the top 10 results are a conversation with someone named Jack – and no answers. As Paul Kedrosky puts it, “Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. …Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility.”

Most of what we do online to make decisions – searching for data, seeking to understand what it means, and then understanding what’s important to us – has already been done by someone else who’d like to share their research. And, if it was available to you, you wouldn’t mind making that research a bit better. We just need the tools."