Um artigo do NY Times abordou a forma como os jornalistas estão a escrever títulos tendo em mente os motores de busca e não os leitores:
News organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing.
O texto tem gerado uma discussão interessante na blogosfera.
Jeff Jarvis parece não ver grande problema nesta adaptação da escrita aos alogorítmos dos motores de busca:
The fear about SEO is that it dumbs-down or blunts-up the presentation of content to a search engine can understand what a story is about and lead readers interested in that topic to it. But I’m not so sure that simplicity, directness, and bluntness are so bad. How often have you read headlines and the first halves of overwritten newspaper and magazine stories wondering what the hell they are about?
Nicholas Carr, contudo, lança uma questão pertinente: onde vai parar esta search engine optimization? Dos títulos, defende, passar-se-á para os primeiros parágrafos, daí para todo o texto e, de seguida, para o próprio processo de selecção de estórias:
He [Jeff Jarvis] is missing out on all the wit and wisdom that, at their best, headline writers can compress into just four or five words. Writing for a machine is worse than a guarantee of blandness.
(…)
Where does it end? Certainly not with headlines. Search engines don’t stop there, so why should journalists? Why not stuff the first couple of paragraphs with search-engine-friendly terms? Hell, why not just gin up your own algorithm for giving stories an SEO tweak before they run? That wouldn’t just get you higher rankings. It would also, no doubt, give your stories greater “simplicity, directness, and bluntness.” And once you’ve got that down, why not cobble together another algorithm to decide what stories you should write in the first place?
A propósito da influência dos motores de busca na informação produzida na Web, recupero um excelente artigo - originalmente publicado no Wall Street Journal (que é só para assinantes), mas disponível aqui -, no qual o autor entrou no mundo da produção de “conteúdo original”:
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.
(…)
In fact, search engines are more like a TV camera crew let loose in the middle of a crowd of rowdy fans after a game. Seeing the camera, everyone acts boorishly and jostles to get in front. The act of observing something changes it.
