Does Google spawn bad writing?

Search engines like Google reward sites with "original content" by placing them higher in rankings. That's spawned an industry of content creation, as Web sites look to get original articles for their sites to drive traffic, and ad dollars.

But the Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes found that the process for producing that content is not exactly conducive to stellar writing. Gomes placed bids on jobs writing for Web sites, and got one assignment that entailed writing 50 articles, each 500 words long, for $100 total.

At first he spent time researching and reporting on the assigned topics, only to find that's not exactly what the employer had in mind.

"My job, it became clear, was to make enough small changes to the text for Whirlywinds to be able to pass it off to search engines as his own. Which is, in fact, what most of the 'original content' on these sites turns out to be: cut-and-paste jobs with superficial modifications."

Blog community response:

"Search engines didn't invent charlatanism. They're just turning it into a modern global industry, complete with cheap offshore labor."
--Rough Type

"Content creches are an occult compact between Google (mostly) and the 'entrepreneurs' who deliver the content and clicks which enrich both sides in the equation. It can be done well, though. And that's the task of real writers like Lee Gomes and others."
--Syntagma

"The only solution to the problem seems to be some human editing or deep localization and categorization but that would make the complex sytem more complex. And considering the volume of web pages on the net, human editing seems impossible and auto categorization - a big challenge."
--Newsmotto