Don’t let the title of the post fool you. I’m not talking about people. I’m pretty much talking about technology. I was going through Google Finance, checking out eBay’s stock price. I typically avoid the forums as it’s swarmed with nutters. But one thing did catch my attention:

There was a link to so-called “news” from PRNine.com which can be found here. The article is bad enough. Yet another “outraged” eBay seller griping about his/her misfortunes on eBay and how eBay “stole” her money. She tries to provide an “example” of just how horrible eBay’s pricing is. Yes, her analysis is, well, bad for a self-admitted MBA.  Her assumptions are all wrong. In essence, she treats eBay and PayPal’s fees as the same when they are different. For example, she would, in most cases, pay some form of fee for payment processing to someone else. Whether the fees end up at eBay or PayPal is irrelevant.

The second point, and one she goes on to nag about incessantly is that her poor margins are slim. ~10%. She is then upset that on 182 items, she made less than minimum wage. Yet, in reality, most brick and mortar stores have far more than 182 products on the shelves. I could go on, but I won’t. It is pretty sad to see someone this inept writing such garbage. Eh, GIGO I guess.

What does amuse me though is that with all of this newfangled new media technology, it is still pretty stupid. PRNine should be a bit ashamed for publishing such a horribly written PR piece. While most PR releases are fluff pieces, this letter breaks every rule of PR releases with no shame. So PRNine isn’t filtering their content for garbage and Google is sucking up without filtering garbabe and so now we all see the garbage.

So there’s the money making idea: How do you create a technology that can filter out the human induced garbage? This isn’t the first time I’ve found crap in Google. Google pretty much dumps wholesale garbage syndication into the Finance section.

Humans can filter this data down when the reliability and quality of the content is pivotal to their core business. In Google’s case, they provide the service for free. What is incentive for providing free service? Traffic. Yet when you begin to let the garbage creep in you also greatly reduce the potential for quality traffic landing on your site.

The problem is that Google is now making it harder for the consumer to filter out the garbage from the good – something Google supposedly does better than any other search engine.