Phillip of Google Blogoscoped did an unscientific study, in which 30 of 50 random Blogspot blogs were discovered to be spam, a 60% splog rate. I once hit the “Next Blog” button seven times before I could find a real blog.
Google reacted in partly by introducing Captchas for signing up, and by allowing users to flag content they find questionable. Could this be too little too late? And do they really expect users to flag thousands of spam pages – or do they want to get an idea of general patters that make up this spam, in order to automatically remove large portions of it?
Now, the one thing to remember is that a service having spam blogs in no way decreases the value of that service as a blogging platform. I would not be surprised to learn that there are millions of WordPress spam blogs, but that doesn’t take away from me absolute satisfaction with WordPress.
What the spam blogs do is dilute the blogosphere. With so many bad blogs, the conversation becomes a lot harder to follow. Blog search services are just becoming filled with spam blogs and irrelevant results.
Of course, that’s why the only meta-blog feeds I’ve got (just check my blogroll) are from Findory. It seems to me that feed-based search engines are not going to work anytime soon, because filtering out all spam is something beyond our current capabilities. Even Google has a big problem with all the spam on the net.
The only spam-free search services are those that either choose the items in their index, like Google News and Topix, and those that are based on actual user click-throughs, like Findory. You’ll notice, that since Google web search can’t go with the former, they seem to be looking towards the latter, with Google Personalized Search and the link tracking URLs they seem to be dropping into search results.
Google does seem to be the first major search engine to realize that the next level beyond PageRank is all about letting the users and their behavior control the search rankings. Its a wonder the other engines haven’t tried their own methods, feeling content sticking with a form of link ranking.
No analyst says search innovation is a done deal, and we’ve all been waiting for the next brilliant algorithm. Problem is, who is actually developing it?
Getting back to the topic (boy, do I ramble), I guess my point is that we can try to limit the creation of spam, but it is likely to never be successful enough. Our best bet is to make it so that we never have to see the spam.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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