Content Quality

A while back, when 365 Media was figuring out how to determine which information sources were more reliable than others - we developed the concept of the 'content momentum' of a site. Our NLP-based system were scouring content to find described business events to convert into data changes in existent (customer) databases. We were constantly looking for ways for our system to make better decisions based on things like priority (which news piece is more reliable), efficiency (which site is churning out re-runs and wasting good server time) and ranking (in this industry, which are the best sources of primary news).

Content Momentum was a concept that enabled us to do this - it worked loosely around the mass (size of overall content on site) multiplied by velocity (rate at which new content appears on the site) concept (hence 'momentum') with added caveats around the value of that content as it was processed through our system and then fed back to the training set.

All very interesting. Why am I mentioning this? Well, today Google announced a change to its search algorithm in order to "provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content". Google now cares whether the site has content quality? Well, duh, that's great.