Spam on Google is Getting Worse

[richmar]

I am very disappointed with Google and the amount of spam lurking within the top 10 of search results for many branded terms.

Personally, I hope a new search engine enters the market place which cares about great search results and users don't have to sift through the irrelevant, spam and porn currently found on Google results.

My favorite was Infoseek, a great search engine which gave you instant submission results and good quality search listings.

Marysza

[OneMoreBite]

Hi Marysza,

I agree. The results are a bit troublesome of late. Here's an example of a site which has placement far before my site at Google for the search term "weight loss." Actually I can't no longer find my site, but I'll keep looking.

Overall the results were better than a couple of days ago, so they seem to be making some changes, yet here was an interesting listing:

Title: Domain names, free domain name, web hosting and email address by ...

Description: SEARCH THE WEB: Weight Loss. SEARCH THE WEB:

How is that relevant in any way shape or form, and how is it more relevant than a page with good, original content relating to the search term. My site is, after all, about weight loss.

I clicked the link to the page and found a search results page with a message: "Sorry, no search results were available. Click here to search again"

BTW, that empty result's page has a PR of 5. So much for page rank, so much for relevant results, but we all have to remember, we're dealing with computers, not people.

Kathryn

[trevorml]

Actually...we are dealing with people- people want to make money- not computers. If the results are getting worse (or more commercial) it's because people are changing them. Google is looking to IPO- so they want to show investors numbers. Too bad. They should stay private and allow moderate revenue growth. It looks like they may be "cashing in".

[OneMoreBite]

Yes, but it is computer programs determining what will and won't be shown. By "we are dealing with computers" I meant, we have to consider the limitations of our own ability to create computer programs, bots, etc. that can determine via the code they find, just what a page is about.

I can't imagine how they'd ever create a program sophisticated enough to know the difference between an optimized site with good content and a site that's been cleverly designed to trick the bots. Computers aren't clever, after all, they only can accomplish the precise tasks for that which they've been designed.

Witness the horrible results of the filters being used to stop spam - I cannot even use the word "grape" in a newslettter because the filters find an offensive word within it. Cumulative is another word I've found impossible to get past the filters (used on my daily results for a daytrading site), so it seems the computers are posting a bit of a problem in trying to determine content. They simply are not smart enough.

I think a combination of computer generated results along with human intervention to clean it up, but who will pay for that? Me? You? The searcher? We'll have to wait and see how it plays out, I guess, or invent something better ourselves. This industry is still just a baby, after all. That's why it's so fun.

Kathryn

[richmar]

Google has sent me this URL to report spam sites to. They encourage folks to report inaccurate or misleading listings. I've reported dozens of offending sites thus far. We'll see what happens. Here's the url:

www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

[OneMoreBite]

That spam report url www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html might come in handy now - in the old days I questioned whether it would be worth the time to use, but since Google appears to be making an effort, it could be more effective.

Thanks, Mary.
Kathryn

[nakulgoyal]

I also see a lot of SPAM. People just keep a copy of the Results Pages and modify the links to go to their own websites driving traffic to themselves. One of them had a hit counter and I saw the traffic he was getting from hit, But say 2 weeks down the line, he is nowhere.

Google is constantly monitoring and it helps keep the Quality.

[dbowlby]

I read one article that Google will kill a page rank if a page is overoptimized. This is a problem for a lot of sites. For instance, I manage a site for a liquor store that lists his inventory in a table. He has 5 different types of Absolut Vodka that each come in 5 different quantites which are listed 1 after the other. Therefore my fear is if I repeat the word Absolut in each of 25 rows one after another his site will be dropped. It's ridiculous. They should have left things where they were. The results being returned were at least relevant.

[redcircle]

I reported a spammer.. maybe 2 months ago.. they're still ranked #1 through #50. (mirror sites)

Search: i90 ringtone

[Garrett]

Ironically enough, this was actually brought up in one of the sessions.

Someone asked about reporting search engine spam. Apparently, some of his competitors are regularly spamming the search engines and he's reported them to Google on numerous occasions over the past three months, but nothing's happened.

The Google representative couldn't address the question directly but basically said, "We're obsessed with quality. Although we still find poor search results, we have a very large team focused on the quality of searches."

But when asked why Google isn't being more responsive to spam reports -- he pretty much dodged the question.