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.

Re:Everyone - Attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Please start deleting items from the Internet. It is getting full.

Oh my god, does that mean that offering everyone on the planet 1GB mail accounts for free and allowing everyone to host his shitty blog for free is not a profitable business anymore? Who would have thought!

http://fuckedgoogle.com/ [fuckedgoogle.com]

Re:Everyone - Attention

[cashman73]

Can we start by getting rid of MySpace? That seems to be huge waste of space and bandwidth, and with 60 million subscribers, would definitely cut down on the internet's bloat.

Adsense is to blame

[wackysootroom]

In creating adsense, google opened the floodgates for spammers who do not want to create good content. In fact, there are even people who copy tons of content from wikipedia and throw up adsense on the top and sides of the pages.

There are people who are literally making $10,000 or more per month just putting up junk content sites that are auto generated for the purpose of creating adsense revenue.

Don't get me wrong, I think adsense is a good thing, but Google's allowance of spam sites is giving adsense a bad name.

One idea?

[955301]

Well given that a human would have a hard time deciding if the page was autogen'ed if the text was in their second language, this *is* quite an issue.

So it sounds like Google needs to *shudder* have a user feedback system where humans with logins add moderation metadata to the search results and in return get results based on this moderation en-mass.

I know what your thinking, /. has it and it sux, but does it really? I'm always pretty confident that the goatse and gnaa and all that other crap will never make it to a score of 5 when I'm on it. Maybe that's what Google needs to throw the weight back in their court - human intervention on a colossal scale.

It would withstand abuse since a massive amount of human inputed data would keep spambots from trying to exploit the moderation system. What's more, their toolbar could incorporate the control to flag a page as autogen'ed garbage.

Re:Everyone - Attention

[feepness]

Hmmm, it appears requiring a sense of humor for access to the internets might cut down on 'indignant post' volume as well.

Re:Adsense is to blame

[truthsearch]

What's interesting is that Google is pretty good at blocking these spam sites from the index, like the wikipedia copies. But since Yahoo and MSN are terrible at blocking them these spammers are making Google money without flooding Google's own index.

I believe this is all an unintentional consequence of AdSense. I'm sure the people at Google knew some of this would happen, but probably not to this extent.

Re:Google is full. Try this...

[pembo13]

I guess the OP didn't expect you to actually try it out.