The thousands of (syndicated) machine-generated pages with scraped product reviews from CNET [1] stuffed with affiliate links, ending with tastefully concealed links to every "[manufacturer] headphones" [2], with no actual relevance or relationship [3] with anything TechCrunch reports on x 5 "guides". It's pretty conventional spam.
[1] extra irony: they nofollow all the CNET links to avoid making the links valuable to their competitor
Basically they use FindTheBest, which takes info from various sources (not just cnet). I guess AOL either owns FindTheBest or they have an agreement with them.
If that is bad, then what do you think of google? Their search engine is a machine-generated series of scraped website snippets, laced with adverts that track practically every site you visit.
Also, what do you think of linkedin (which I see you have an account on?) I can't even view your full profile because linkedin want to screw me for some money to even view anyone's profile now. Also they offer to tell you who has viewed your profile if you pay them money. That seems a lot more shitty than what AOL/Techcrunch is doing in my opinion.
The pages are of no value to the end user and are designed purely to usurp traffic from search engines and shit that traffic out through affiliate links. Instead of getting reviews that matter when you search you get spam tainting the results and getting in your way.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding spam when you relate it to what Google and LinkedIn do. What Google does is sift through this shit trying to find the right answer to whatever question. What LinkedIn does has no relevance at all.
I never said that linkedin or google were spamming. All I was saying is that they are slightly evil and annoying. I'm also not sure I agree with your assessment of the techcrunch reviews.
By my count the company fronting the content has something like ~100 million machine-generated pages polluting the internet as of 6 months ago, being hosted and re-hosted under dozens of different domains. At what point does it become spam in your opinion?
