Microsoft and UC Davis Examine Search Engine Spam
Spam is a problem that has primarily been known for its unwelcome presence in e-mail inboxes across the world, but the average Web user also knows that spam is a large inconvenience to their online search experience. Microsoft teamed up with researchers at the University of California, Davis to take a closer look at this problem.
A proprietary tool called Fiddler was utilized in the study by Microsoft, and was used to track the money flow from advertisers to the actual search engine spammers themselves. The findings indicated that there are a small number of spammers responsible for a big portion of all search engine spam.
Blogger (blogspot.com), Google’s free weblog offering, hosts about a quarter of all spam appearances in the study. At least three out of every four blogspot URLs that turned up in the top-50 results for commercial queries were spam.
Researchers also found that over 60% of unique .info URLs that turned up in search results were spam.
Spam domain topsearch10.com was involved in more than 1,000 spam occurrences in the research tests. Also, two IP blocks were identified as key channels for spammers.
"Drugs" and "ring tone" were among some keywords that turned up more fake spam pages that made up more than 30% of all results.
The kicker is that major advertisers are the ones who are fueling and rewarding these spammers. Sites like bizrate.com, shopping.com, orbitz.com, and shopzilla.com were among some of the major names that had ads appearing on spam sites.
This would indicate that a more astute awareness and greater diligence on the part of advertisers would help immensely in the fight against the dilution and decay of the overall Web experience.
"Ultimately," the study said, "it is advertisers’ money that is funding the search spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users’ productivity." The study also indicates that search engine spammers are hurting the long-term health of the Internet.
The study also voices the need for better education for Web users, so that they will not click on so many spam links and ads, which would make this shady business far less lucrative for those behind these schemes.
Sources:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=129
http://news.com.com/Researchers+track+down
+a+plague+of+fake+Web+pages/2100-7355_3-
6168331.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070319/
tc_infoworld/86965;_ylt=AsmX_yCZI23ld6HgSk4
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