There has been a lot of buzz about blog spam in the last week or so. On August 9th Technorati’s David Sifry talked about Spam and Fake Blogs, and then on August 15th Mark Cuban (Investor in IceRocket) talked about splogs. I’m sure it’s just coincidence that this happened after my August 4th post on the topic.
Mark Cuban’s remarks that:
If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com’s, and other search engines’ indexes increases.
His implication is that one way to help produce better searches is by not indexing any of the blogs on Blogger. This seems like a very heavy-handed way to go about things. Eliminating spam from search results is all about providing their search users the best possible experience. If including Blogger blogs causes their search results to be awful, and removing them improves things, then they might to do it. Its up to services (like IceRocket, Technorati, Bloglines, etc) to decide what the best way to fight spam is. In my opinion its not removing Blogger blogs from their index, its finding an algorithm to distinguish spam blogs from real blogs.
David Sifry (from Technorati) seems to agree:
it requires a lot of algorithms, deep thinking, and human intervention to build and monitor systems that deal with these problems. It is also an ongoing issue that needs time, care and attention as spammers come up with new and innovative ways to get game search engines and affiliate networks.
All the major web search engines like Google and Yahoo have had to go to great lengths to try to eliminate spam from their results, and now the blog specific search engines are going through the same thing. It’s an ongoing battle in web search and it will be an ongoing battle in blog search.
The winner of the blog search engine wars will be the one that does the best job of returning relevant results to their users, and a big part of this will be filtering blog spam.
