Planes and Solids, a Dummy Comparison

Common solid shapes

Back in late 2011 when Google changed its algorithm to lower the search placement of "low-quality"¹ content, most of the content farms immediately felt the impact of the Panda update. Many folded entirely within a few months, but eHow.com – the poster child for low quality – soldiered on. The parent company, rebranded as Leaf Group, is now parceling eHow content out to niche sites, but much of the rubbish remains. Take, for instance, the post "How to Calculate Volume" by Julie Richards, which now resides at Sciencing.com. Take it, please...

Richards, a Buckeye freelancer in search of an English Lit degree, demonstrated from the get-go that she had forgotten basic geometry (if she ever knew it) with this introductory sentence:

"You can calculate volume with an easy to use formula. The standard shapes such as a square or rectangle all use the same formula."

OK, Julie, first things first: squares and rectangles are two-dimensional objects that – by definition – do not have volume. They only have area. Second, WTF are "standard shapes"? And last but not least, the references in the original at eHow included the eHow article "Calculate volume of a cylinder"; you didn't mention cylinders at all...
Oh, sure, the blind pig found the acorn for rectangular solids (v = l*w*h), but she never mentioned any other shapes at all: not pyramids, cylinders, spheres, cones, prisms, or any of the other myriad shapes; several of which are "standard," too. Her best defense is laziness, we guess, since she did  warn her readers...

"This formula is for square or rectangular objects..."

...once again confusing planes with solids. What a yutz! Yet eHow not only published this dreck back in 2008 or so, it also made it past a content editor (most likely another English major or someone with a "communications" degree). Now it's made it through, supposedly anyway, another extreme vetting to get to Sciencing.com. It makes us wonder who really deserves a Dumbass of the Day award for this rubbish.

¹ By "quality," Google seems to have meant "searchability" as opposed to accuracy, honesty, readability, and all the other aspects old farts like our staff think of when the word is used to describe written content. Sigh...

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