The man behind the IceRocket blog search engine wrote in to clarify how they are dealing with spam blogs, and IceRocket’s stance on Google’s Blogger hosting service.
The owner of the Dallas Mavericks was gracious enough to take a few minutes today to touch base with me about how IceRocket deals with BlogSpot. I had observed in an article last week that Cuban’s blog search had banned BlogSpot blogs.
Cuban said today that isn’t the case. “We don’t filter out ALL BlogSpot blogs. We spend a lot of time scrubbing, we even added human intervention to try to make sure good BlogSpot blogs stay. And of course if we miss one, people let us know and we add it back.”
He noted that in a given month, IceRocket filters over a million splogs. “Sad thing now, is that although in absolute numbers BlogSpot hasn’t declined, there are so many new free host sites popping up that are nothing but splogs, as a [percentage] BlogSpot is declining.”
I was surprised to find IceRocket had made people part of the editing process, instead of relying wholly on technology. While Cuban would not get into specifics on the human facet of the splog fight (“Can’t give our secrets away,” he said), he did provide some enlightenment on how IceRocket conducts its fight against splogs:
(A)ll the sploggers have the same problem, and that’s what our people look for when analyzing what is being pinged to us.
Remember, we get our content by indexing and by having it pinged to us. We don’t have a problem with indexed splogs, so we just have to analyze what is pinged to us. That allows us to work faster and better
Cuban sees splogs as such a problem for search engines that he disputes just how many truly fill an index. “Some other search sites are saying that 8 [percent] of their new blogs are splogs; then they are missing MILLIONS of them.”
He closed with an observation on a good way to figure out how many splogs are in a given search index: “Do a search on a word like casino. Since casinos pay a lot for referrals, that’s a good indication of the level of splogs in an index.”
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
