In what appears to be a hot and nasty brawl brewing between David and Goliath, a tale of two search engines is getting significant press about respective plans to fight spam by removing spam-laden sites from search results. It has all the trappings of a prize-fight: in this corner, the search engine behemoth Google, weighing in at several billion dollars; in that corner Blekko, the relatively unknown challenger, new to the scene but poised to take on its opponent with what Blekko calls, \u201cthe first search algorithm ever created to find spam rather than rank results.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blekko, the nascent search engine that launched last November, announced last week<\/a> that it has identified over a million web domains as spam and blocked them from its search results. Utilizing a technology that Blekko calls its AdSpam algorithm, the move could have tremendous implications, at least for the users of Blekko, which reports a million queries a day and about a half million users each month. Rather than adopting Google\u2019s method of lowering the rank of suspicious sites in its search results, AdSpam instead takes a scorched earth policy by identifying sites that are laden with ads and light on content, and blocking them altogether<\/p>\n

The move of blocking 1.1 million domains has the direct effect of removing potentially hundreds of millions of spam pages, an achievement of which Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta is tremendously proud. \u201cDomains with low quality content plus keyword ads are \u2018machines that print money,\u2019 Skrenta has been quoted<\/a>. \u201cIf you make a machine to print money, people will exploit it.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Blekko<\/a>, AdSpam is \u201ca machine-learning algorithm that examines pages for a specific spam signals \u2014 the presence of multiple display ad positions on a single page and thin to zero content. Unlike algorithms used by other search engines, AdSpam is being used in conjunction with human curation to detect [Spam and] continue the War on Spam.\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes Blekko unique is its search method utilizing slashtags<\/a> to pinpoint search and minimize spam results. By targeting content farms that push spam (like eHow.com and answerbag.com), Blekko has managed to provide what it feels is the path to \u201cbetter search results\u2026by using an algorithm that was created to kill spam, not just crawl it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This latest development is just another foray in a war that both Google and Blekko have committed to fighting. \u201cIn the past, our efforts to clean-up search have included our partnership with the Stack Overflow community,\u201d states the Blekko blog<\/a>, \u201cand our public banning of the top 20 sites<\/a> most users marked as spam at Blekko.\u201d What remains to be seen is what both engines have up their sleeves. According to The New York Times<\/a>, Skrenta hasn\u2019t been squeamish about calling out Google. \u201cGoogle didn\u2019t actually take anyone out, they just reshuffled the deck. Instead of demoting these sites to No. 5 or No. 7, we\u2019re just throwing them out.\u201d<\/p>\n

It should be stressed that Googoliath hasn\u2019t exactly been sitting on its hands. In the past several months there has been a public backlash on the deteriorating quality of Google\u2019s search results. The company has responded with series of remedies, including updated search algorithms and the penalizing of low quality sites like content farms. In fact, RCR Unplugged<\/a> reports that the recent \u2018Panda\u2019 update to Google\u2019s algorithm caused such a swing in page rankings that how-to site Mahalo had to lay off staff almost immediately.<\/p>\n

Most recently<\/a>, Google reports that it\u2019s adding a \u2018Block All Results\u2019 option that will live right next to the \u2018Cached\u2019 and \u2018Similar\u2019 buttons, so that users can choose to weed out the spam that seems to have mastered the art of worming its way into the top ranks of Google. Even though Google\u2019s blog talks about this functionality as if it\u2019s already here, there\u2019s no indication if or when it will become active \u2013 a search performed while this article was written revealed no \u2018Block\u2019 link \u2013 please feel free to leave a comment if you\u2019ve seen it in the wild.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, there are inherent problems with Google\u2019s proposed solutions. First, it\u2019s difficult to identify an entire site as spam simply from search results. Also, sites like Mahalo will suffer from algorithms that box up their criteria in a way that may misidentify legitimate sites. For example, Google\u2019s new algorithms are based on the consistency of content \u2013 a site that focuses on one topic, like healthcare, will probably not be flagged whereas a generalized site with content based on a variety of topics may suffer the wrath of the giant G. By its own admission, Google states \u201cgenerally low quality\u201d of content as a reason to block something. For sites which rely on user-generated content by nonprofessional writers, this could end up being a troubling trend.<\/p>\n

So who has the right formula? Bing and Yahoo haven\u2019t really entered the fray as of yet, perhaps waiting to see what Google has to say on the whole matter of spam sites. Blekko, on the other hand, has chosen to lead and not to follow, a move that could greatly benefit the company as searchers seek alternatives to the millions of results being passed back to the end user. By being proactive, they certainly seem to be taking the war to the content farms and the unending battle between search engine and spam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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