Like most professionals in the technology field, I jump to Google and other search engines fairly frequently, in pursuit of hints and documentation to help with various technology dilemmas. A quick search on the web and the archives of newsgroups usually saves a tremendous amount of documentation diving and experimentation.

In return for the huge benefit that other people's documented successes, failures, and experiences bring, it has long motivated me to "pay it forward" by posting technology information online myself, hoping to help some future information seekers (on a similar vein, whenever I get a worthwhile answer on the newsgroups, I usually make it a habit of hanging around and answering several questions myself, returning the favour to the community). If the search logs are to be believed, over the years quite a few people have found pertinent information here regarding their software development problems or questions.

Lately I've been noticing a decreasing utility-versus-search time ratio, however, with quality declining largely as a result of a growing number of high-pagerank sites feeding cloaked/phantom pages to the Google search engine. Google sees a question/response that correlates closely with what the information seeker is asking, yet a visit by a real user (rather than a search engine spider) quickly finds only the question, with the answer suppressed until the user a) goes through an irritating, arduous process to sign up as a member on yet another infrequently visited edge site that'll likely sell their email address and bombard them with endless ads, b) signs up for some sort of pay membership. Given that many of these sites are simply siphoning their content from the Usenet or other forums, I'm never going to bother with either option, instead hitting back and following the next link, often to find the same sort of nonsense.

Somehow a small number of these phantom page sites, most of them seemingly linked to by no one legitimate, have taken over the top rankings on Google for a huge range of technical searches. Somehow they haven't been banned by Google yet, despite the fact that cloaked pages are expressly forbidden (if the search engine sees the answer, then any random visitor should immediately see the answer by following the search link, as the search engine hint implies that the immediate page contains the result).

If they feel justified in forcing registration to read often coopted content, or the right to charge a membership, I have absolutely no problem with that -- in fact I think the net would be a better place if there were more commercial opportunities encouraging even more intellectual investments. However they shouldn't fraudulently mislead search engines, and search users, and instead should rely upon normal advertising and word-of-excellence for their great utility. Otherwise they should fold, joining the heap of useless websites that could only fool users into visiting.

Don't waste our bloody time! Google shouldn't be acting by implicit complicity in these irritating schemes.

Speaking of the problem of apparent phantom pages, today I happened to be looking for CodeSmith, a free (albeit crippleware for as long as I can remember, and not freeware as the author continually claims) code generation tool that I had fond memories of several years back. Naturally I begin the search with codesmith freeware.

Great, so the page in question apparently talks about the freeware version of CodeSmith. Only it doesn't, and the text in question doesn't appear anywhere on the linked page. Go ahead -- look at that page and search the source for freeware.

In reality the obsolete and deprecated freeware/crippleware version exists on a totally different page (one which doesn't seem to be referenced anywhere else on the CodeSmith page). So why is my time being wasted with the first, desperate-to-turn-a-sale page? Why is Google entirely misleading me about the contents of said page? This sort of bait-and-switch has to stop.

Completely offtopic, but forcing people to register and anxiously wait for a download key to download a crippled, time-limited version is enormously irritating. It really pushes my patience when I just want to validate a product, almost certain of it turning to a multi-license sale, and finding that I'm forced to go through some B.S. that will inevitably yield annoying sales emails and followups.

Just let me download the demo, and if it's good I'll buy. If it isn't, you don't deserve the right to harrass me with promotions and petitions.