College Kingdom Educational Search Shows Desperate Need to Clean Up EDU Sites
College Kingdom has launched new search tools for students, or anyone for that matter, to search over seven thousand colleges’, universities’, career schools’, and adult education programs’ websites all at once. This is a great new search tool. However, the search results show the desperate need for those educational institutions–or Google, to clean up their websites.
After first hearing about the new College Kingdom educational search tools, I headed over to the site. The site uses the Google Custom Search Engine(TM). The search results come from Google, but those search results have been customized to include search results only from the schools’ websites. What’s cool is that you can easily search the websites of over 7,000 Colleges, Universities, Career Schools and Adult Education programs. What’s not cool is the amount of spam that still plagues these websites.
As you probably know, I’m a few years past my college years, so the “online marketer” in me decided to use the College Kingdom search tool to search for links. I first tried a search for “add url”. There literally appear to be thousands of results, but what’s disturbing is the amount of spam that appears:
There are a few search results that are appropriate, but the fourth search result shows a “acne” spam that appears on the NYU.edu site. I also see spam for Wellbutrin, Flomax, and other pills–in the top 10 search results. Just try performing a search for “wellbutrin” using College Kingdom’s search and the results are riddled with spam. Tamu.edu, sdsu.edu, and even ucsd.edu are even offenders: they have plenty of spam content on their websites.
Another interesting search is the search for “sponsored links”. If you’re searching for sponsored links–or places where you can buy a text link on a university website there are plenty of them available.
Don’t Blame College Kingdom
I certainly do not blame College Kingdom for showing all of this search spam. After all, there are generally two parties to point the finger at here: the educational institutions themselves for allowing the spam on their sites and not cleaning it up, and Google. Surely Google would be able to make sure that spam pages on .edu sites shouldn’t show up in their search results.
Jan 15th 2008
university web sites are usually horribly updated as well. Untouched for years
Jan 16th 2008
Over 7000 colleges, universities- really unbeaten.This is a great new search tool. Another interesting search is the search for sponsored links. But one disadvantage is that, spam still plagues here. Thanks for the article.
Jan 16th 2008
This sounds like an excellent resource besides the junk, and the timing is perfect as well. My daughter is a junior in high school with college coming on quick. Since she has no idea where she wants to attend school this can help us sort out and search for potential places she would like to attend.
Jan 16th 2008
Thanks for the review. Your unique approach to using the site is neat to see. I agree that some schools need to do a much better job of keeping spam off their site. Hopefully the spam will not appear for education type searches, i.e. “economics master degree” or “ba journalism”.
A feature that might not be apparent – you can search the websites of a subset of the schools, say, only schools that offer Distance Learning programs or only schools in New York that offer Adult Education programs. We’ve tried to make the site and search options as flexible as possible.
Thanks again for the review.
Bill
Jan 16th 2008
Nice post Bill…. thanks. I have been playing with GCS for while now and this is a great implemetation. Good find :0)
Dave
Jan 17th 2008
It seems spam is everywhere this days…
It’s really like a plague!
At least they should leave the schools alone, education should be sacred!
P.S. What’s next? Official college sites with AdSense?
Jan 17th 2008
Using College Kingdom is an interesting SEO idea, I went and tried the search you did to see the about of spam that pops up and man was I surprised! Its chalk full, a good search idea but now one wants to sift through that much spam.