El Reg Says Google Choking on Spam Sites

Grubby Games writes "The Register is reporting that Google is full, and in trouble." From the article: "Recently, we featured a software tool that can create 100 Blogger weblogs in 24 minutes, called Blog Mass Installer. A subterranean industry of sites providing 'private label articles,' or PLAs exists to flesh out 'content' for these freshly minted sites. And as a result, legitimate sites are often caught in the cross fire. But the new algorithms may not be solely to blame. Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt has hinted at another reason for the recent chaos. In Google's earnings conference call last month, Schmidt was frank about the extent of the problem. 'Those machines are full,' he said. 'We have a huge machine crisis.'" James Robertson points out that's a fairly selective bit of quoting.

How accurate is the Register Article?

[xmas2003]

James Robertson suggests that Orlowski mis-reports it again [cincomsmalltalk.com] and says that the Register report is a "fairly nasty bit of selective quoting" and was referenced in the DIGG commentary that Google's not full. [digg.com]

With hardware (and bandwidth) getting cheaper, I find it hard to believe that Google has actually run out of space. But certainly the explosion in the number of web pages is an issue, especially with auto-generated pages. One current example is the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem SEO contest [watching-paint-dry.com] (white-hat celiac charity site I'm supporting) - that nonsense phrase returned zero results on January 15th, 2006 ... but now returns almost 5,000,000 ... of which I gotta believe the vast majority were NOT typed in by humans.

So maybe it's more that the techniques/algorithms used to spider and index are struggling with the bazillions of web pages out there. Or it could just be disgruntled webmasters PO'ed that their web site isn't listed!

Not so sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gmail:

Over 2721.241062 megabytes (and counting) of free storage...

Methinks Google has more room to spare than The Register says.

The Reg MIght Be On To Something

[cfoster611]

I glance at the google results for some of my own sites and the Reg is correct, Google's index is completely out of date, even for a super small time guy like me.

I know the GoogleBot indexes the site almost every day. Yet, while one of my sites is completely out of date (the Cache is from 2005), another is almost completely up to date.

Google's got problems.

Re:How accurate is the Register Article?

[david.given]

Andrew Orlowski seems to have this weird grudge against Google --- he's been posting reams of violently anti-Google stories for, well, years now. It's reached the stage where if the subject line has 'Google' in it, and Orlowski's byline is attached, I just skip over; even if there's actual information there, it's going to be so wrapped up in snide misreporting as to be useless.

Be warned.

Re:How accurate is the Register Article?

[Richard_at_work]

The Register is one of the most bias, spinning tech news sites Ive ever read, and I first started reading it 6 years ago - its only got worse since then. I actually refuse to browse the site these days, only reading their articles when directly linked and pretty much all of them have some really evil spin on them.

Re:Google is full. Try this...

[j_snare]

Try this...

Go to yahoo and search for "slashdot poneys". This will bring up a bunch of results, all approximately 1 month old.

Now do the same search on google. Notice how many of the results from yahoo do not appear in the google results at all.

Google has such a big backlog that they don't get around to spidering new sites for several months. While google does give priority to certain high-profile sites like slashdot and visits those frequently, most other sites do not get indexed for several months.

Okay, so I tried this, just for kicks. You can verify, by a single click:
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=slashdot+ponies [yahoo.com]
Google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=slashdot+poni es [google.com]

Since when does 44900 results on Yahoo mean that they have more than 92100 results on Google? As far as what's appearing, I was able to find most every one I saw on Yahoo on the first 2 or so pages of Google's results. I also see more results on Google that look like they'll show me more of what I'm looking for (since I am probably looking for the April 1st joke, screenshots especially).

Works alright for me. Looks like I don't have a reason to switch again yet.

Re:Everyone - Attention

[jb.hl.com]

No. Not solved. MySpace is nowhere near a problem. I've yet to see MySpace used as a link farm, anywhere, hell I've never even seen a MySpace page in a Google result (except results for "MySpace" obviously). I'd probably count Blogger as the thing that should be deleted, as well as poorly configured WordPress installations which allow anonymous commenting.

Maybe you should let your own little personal prejudices slide a bit. MySpace isn't the great Internet evil, you know.

Re:How accurate is the Register Article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Orlovski? Isn't he the guy that also hates Wikipedia, with his sneering remarks about wiki-fiddlers and barely restraining himself from referring to them as Wikipedophiles?

I don't know what his problem is, perhaps he just needs pageviews for the advertisers. So: write knocking article about popular website, fans of the website look, pageviews escalate.

Google -- check.
Wikipedia -- Check
Slashdot -- ?

(The captcha word for this submission was "referral". How do they do that?)

Careful...

[Skadet]

3. DDoS the spammers and linkfarmers. Yes, it's illegal. Yes, I don't give a fuck. No, not the sender. It's more likely than not a hijacked PC. DDoS the linked page. Blow the one who decided that spam is the way to advertize his service off the net. Don't worry, you won't start a war. That's already running. Needn't do it right away, but I'd reserve that as an option if the rest fails.

Careful, that linked page is 99.9% likely to be a legitimate user's hacked hosting account. What's faaaaaar more effective is a phone call (or even an email!) to the hosting company. When I worked support for a hosting company and I got a call about this, it'd take me all of 2 seconds to suspend the account.

DDoSing the linked page is:
1. no skin off of the spammer's nose
2. a pain in the ass to the hosting company
3. far more time-consuming and less effective than a quick phone call.

We're smarter than those spammers, let's act like it.

Re:One idea?

[humble.fool]

Hey, looks like they are:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-tes t-this-is-only-test.html [blogspot.com] The Googleblog shows that they have a cookie-based "block this site from results" feature in general beta test to random people on the site.