Yes – but they aren’t the only ones.
Simply put, unless the writing is for writing’s sake alone, someone is skewing things – and with search engines the final arbitrator of all things online, they are skewing the most.
Of course, this has gone on forever – what would Shakespeare have written if he wasn’t trying to make ends meet? And what kind of television programs and books would we have today if people could be paid equally well for “Masterpiece Theater” and “White Chicks”?
However, search engines add something the others didn’t – an impersonal nonhuman aspect – the computer program.
Now, people write not to entertain or cater to another person – but to cater to an algorithm.
Websites add words not to help with a topic, but to gain market share.
And unlike the news programs that have gone sensationalist (“why apples CAN kill you – more at eleven”), the catering doesn’t even need to be understandable, interesting, or even idiosyncratically correct – because the English is only needed to ‘skew’ a computer program.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the top 10 entries in Google for any topic (and especially for competitive ones) – and ask yourself if they are prime examples of English prose, or if their ranking has to do more with how they bend the English language to fit the search engine’s needs.
Then ask yourself: if you wanted a top ranking, how much would you have to ‘tweak’ your web page to get there? How many concessions to the language?
Of course this is a tempest in a teacup – few websites need to treasure their prose, since the average site is selling, and sales text is not necessarily the prime example of English at any time.
But I was prompted in part to write this post because of a blogger who wrote that you HAD to write to get the attention of the search engines.
And while true, it’s a sad commentary that even blogging, an area that still tries to preserve the English language and interesting prose online, now needs to kowtow to a computer to be visible.
…I wonder what Shakespeare would write today if he had to please Google?
