Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

El Reg Says Google Choking on Spam Sites 234

Posted by Zonk from the don't-believe-everything-you-read dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

El Reg Says Google Choking on Spam Sites More

El Reg Says Google Choking on Spam Sites

Comments Filter:

  • Everyone - Attention (Score:5, Funny)

    by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:20PM (#15273045) Journal
    Please start deleting items from the Internet. It is getting full.

    Thanks!

    • Re:Everyone - Attention (Score:5, Funny)

      by endrue ( 927487 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:24PM (#15273083)
      eh... just defrag

      - Andrew
      • You need free space to do a proper defrag. I suppose you could do what we used to do before defrag utilities were available: back the whole thing up, reinitialize, and restore.
    • 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.

    • Re:Everyone - Attention (Score:5, Funny)

      by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 ) <zachary.pruckowski@gmail.com> on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:36PM (#15273190)
      SFD (Sites for Deletion):
      myspace.com

      Problem solved.
      • 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:Everyone - Attention (Score:5, Insightful)

          by feepness ( 543479 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @05:25PM (#15273529)
          Hmmm, it appears requiring a sense of humor for access to the internets might cut down on 'indignant post' volume as well.

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

          joe-baldwin.net's MySpace profile [myspace.com] complete with auto-playing song.

          We all have bias, you know. :)

          • Now, I have an auto playing song on my myspace page, but it's expressly there to annoy the hell out of people. It's embedded, not using their little convenient flash thing, and i've hidden the controls so you can't stop it. And, what's better, it's Johnny Cash singing cocaine blues! Which...basically makes most people like it, but it used to be a song about grotesque things to do with fetuses! And Jesus dances to it!
            • Now, I have an auto playing song on my myspace page, but it's expressly there to annoy the hell out of people. It's embedded, not using their little convenient flash thing, and i've hidden the controls so you can't stop it. And, what's better, it's Johnny Cash singing cocaine blues! Which...basically makes most people like it, but it used to be a song about grotesque things to do with fetuses! And Jesus dances to it!
               
              Link?
        • MySpace is in fact littered with fake profiles that appear to be real people but are actually advertising products or link spamming.
        • I did see a yahoo blog as a link farm.

          Reported the issue and blammo... content erased...

          Which means someone out there does listen.

        • Remove keyword "blog" and all associated pages. Problem solved.

          MySpace is a useful way of tracking all 9738 of your online friends. Really, would you be able to do that on your own?

        • I'd probably count Blogger as the thing that should be deleted, as well as poorly configured WordPress installations which allow anonymous commenting.

          And what exactly is so "poorly configured" about allowing anonymous commenting? Some of thebest comments come from anonymous users. (Not that anyone in Wordpress is really validated.) Wordpress not only makes anon commenting easy, but it automatically catches many types of spam posts (especially link-spam) and requires that they be approved before going live.
        • ohh, i beleive seeing a filter on yahoo, that allows ou to forget about sites ....

          yes blogger and about,com is one of those I would filter out indefinetely :)

      • Blogger.com. Future problems solved.

    • Re:Everyone - Attention (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      no, just reduce the font. That'll do it.

    • Re:Everyone - Attention (Score:5, Funny)

      by SydBarrett ( 65592 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:54PM (#15273319)
      ATTN: HELPDESK

      Could someone do a quick backup first? There might be something on the internet that I might need later. I think you can just use Ghost or whatever you IT guys do. Also, please burn it to CD and have it on my desk by COB today.

      -Executive Chief Officer SydBarrett
    • Delete from internet.world
      where lower(page_text) like '% beastiality%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% lose weight%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% refinance%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% ebay%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% make money fast%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% enlarge your%'
      or lower(page_text) like '% teens%';
      commit;
    • I hate it when I have to buy a new Internet because mine is full. Hopefully I can get one of the new perpendicular Internets that holds more... wonder if I will need to turn my monitor sideways to use it...
    • Deleting won't help at this point. It's gotten to the point where it needs a format and a clean install.

      Meanwhile we can decide which websites are no longer needed and don't bother reinstalling them, because they're crap anyways and takes up space and hard to remove.

  • How accurate is the Register Article? (Score:5, Informative)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:21PM (#15273049) Homepage
    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!

    • I'm sure it takes Google time to install new machines. If they didn't have installs scheduled that would hook into this system and the space needed was growing exponetially, even they could be caught off-guard.

    • Re:How accurate is the Register Article? (Score:5, Informative)

      by david.given ( 6740 ) <dg@cowlark.com> on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:50PM (#15273296) Homepage Journal
      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? (Score:3, Informative)

        by 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?)
        • 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?

          Yes, that's him. I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember off-hand what his other phobia was (it's late in my time zone).

          He's okay when he's not doing opinion pieces, though.

          • He's okay when he's not doing opinion pieces, though.

            With Orlowski, every piece is an opinion piece.

            The guy's shameless. For pete's sake, he links to the source of the quote he twisted, which makes it clear it has been twisted.

            He's either got no concern for truth, or has no ability to discern it.
            • Are you accusing The Register of biased reporting?!? I thought they were the gold standard of objectivity, but now I may need to reconsider my stance. I guess I'll just have to rely on The Inquirer for a fair and balanced look at the tech industry.
      • Quoth Nick Thomas, first reply to James Robertson's post calling bullshit:

        I thank my lucky stars every day that we have a news reporting medium where people who are spewing bullshit are swiftly called out on it.

        Damn right.
      • Two days ago, Google seemed to forget what enclosed quotes were for. Also, it is returning pages upon pages of useless "supplemental results" -- I often jump to Page 10 just to try to skip past that.

        Let's not even talk about the spam pages. I've emailed suggestions for instance banning domains that use javascript redirects -- you know, you see a SEO page with javascript off and the porno page with it on. No legit site shunts off visitors to third party sites with zero delay.

        I've also suggested a Slashdot ty

    • Re:How accurate is the Register Article? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:53PM (#15273318)
      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.
      • What the hell do you expect from the home of the Bastard Operator From Hell? Cookies and a coupla pints?

      • Calling British journalism biased is missing the point...Of course it's biased. They don't ascribe to the American delusion that journalism can be unbiased.

        They wear their bias on their sleeves, which, in my opinion, is a good thing, because you know the type of slant that's on what you're reading, and nobody claims to be "Fair and Balanced" when they're anything but.
        • The whole "Fair and Balanced" thing is regarded as a bad joke now. Maybe not six years ago, but now Americans are pretty sheepish about the whole affair. But it's not brought up in polite conversation.

          Anyway, the point I wanted to make is that bias is one thing, but distortion is quite another. When one's bias leads one to gross distortions, then there's a problem. I think that's what the poster was getting at.

    • One current example is the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem SEO contest (white-hat celiac charity site I'm supporting)

      Is this in competition with the guy whose girlfriend will have a threesome with him if his blog gets a million hits? If so, I've got to throw in with him. Sorry, sick kids but when you get older, you'll understand.

      Anyway, now that the link has finally loaded while I was writing the above -- OK, the quote is out of context but it's not that out of context. (Certainly not by /. standards for "out of co

    • With hardware (and bandwidth) getting cheaper, I find it hard to believe that Google has actually run out of space.


      Surely, Google isn't the only one to take advantage of cheap hardware? According to Netcraft [netcraft.com] the internet doubled in size in the last three years, increasing by 3.1 million new hostnames in April 2006 alone.

    • With hardware (and bandwidth) getting cheaper, I find it hard to believe that Google has actually run out of space.

      No, but I think it has run out of people to install and manage all that space. Apparently hires into "Reliability Systems Engineering" (or whatever Google calls their system admin group) are one of the hottest areas for Google right now.

    • I stop reading any Reg article as soon as I spot Orlowski's byline. He's their version of Katz. He has a particular bee in his bonnet about Google.

  • Google is Full!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aftk2 ( 556992 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:21PM (#15273060) Homepage Journal
    Wow...so there really is an end to the internet [shibumi.org].

  • Spammer jokes (Score:3, Funny)

    by InvaderSkoodge ( 858660 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:23PM (#15273072)
    I just realized that many of the jokes we apply to lawyers could also be used on spammers with good effect:

    So what do you have when you push 50% of all the spammers in the world into a hole and bury them? A good start.

    Did you know that if you took all the spammers in the world and lined them up end to end around the equator of the earth that two thirds of them would drown?

    • Re:Spammer jokes (Score:5, Funny)

      by cashman73 ( 855518 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:36PM (#15273191) Journal
      A stingy old spammer who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness was determined to prove wrong the saying, "You can't take it with you." After much thought and consideration, the old spammer finally figured out how to take at least some of his money with him when he died. He instructed his wife to go to the bank and withdraw enough money to fill two pillow cases. He then directed her to take the bags of money to the attic and leave them directly above his bed. His plan: When he passed away, he would reach out and grab the bags on his way to heaven. Several weeks after the funeral, the deceased spammer's wife, up in the attic cleaning, came upon the two forgotten pillow cases stuffed with cash. "Oh, that darned old fool," she exclaimed. "I knew he should have had me put the money in the basement."

  • more internet space (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:26PM (#15273104)
    I'm not a computer person, but couldn't Google just upgrade to a bigger disk drive?

    I saw one at bestbuy.com that looks pretty good.

  • Adsense is to blame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wackysootroom ( 243310 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:34PM (#15273175) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Adsense is to blame (Score:4, Interesting)

      by merreborn ( 853723 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:56PM (#15273325) Journal
      ...It's not like google invented internet advertising.

      Banner ads were taking the same path. If anything, we should thank google for making internet advertising less intrusive.

    • Re:Adsense is to blame (Score:5, Funny)

      by Snowmit ( 704081 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:57PM (#15273333) Homepage
      Please tell me how I too can make $10,000 or more per month just by putting up junk content from the comfort of my home. Is there a program that I have to order to learn to do this? Should I act now?
      • Actually, these scraper sites can be really effective in also hurting the sites they take content from. If they end up with a higher pagerank than the site they borrowed content from, the site with the borrowed content can be penalized (and even banned from AdSense themselves!).

        Google is fighting that war fairly well with their new smart pricing system (in AdSense) but I would much prefer to see an option for publishers to opt-in to a better AdSense program that offers possibly better income if new content
    • 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.

  • The Reg MIght Be On To Something (Score:3, Informative)

    by cfoster611 ( 219409 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:35PM (#15273178) Homepage
    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.
    • Your rate of being scanned is based on your pagerank, at least according to the site a previous poster mentioned (look for "stats porn" :-))

      So the site that gets updated has links to it that Google thinks are good, and the site that doesn't get updated doesn't have good linkage. That is to say, if it would come up at the top of the list in a Google search, it gets scanned more often, but if it would come up on page 32 of 32, it gets scanned very very rarely.

  • How Google crawls a site (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) * <jamie@slashdot.org> on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:35PM (#15273181) Journal
    Meanwhile, for no good reason, here's some gorgeous stats porn [drunkmenworkhere.org] on how Google (and Yahoo and MSN) crawled a sample website. The animations and closeups of the trees are very cool.
    • I'm not just saying this cos Jamie posted it, but that is a cool page. I'm too tired to bother trying to understand it right now, but I've bookmarked it, and I'm going to read it another day.

  • Before you get too scared.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:39PM (#15273207) Journal
    Just remember that /dev/null filled up years ago [thbz.org]. Yet, we seem to be doing just fine.

  • I've heard of the user being ignorant... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheNoxx ( 412624 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:39PM (#15273210) Homepage Journal
    You know, writing code and assuming that an end user somewhere will do the dumbest thing imaginable, but I guess nobody ever imagined the possible effects of collusion between extreme stupidity and cleverness (spammers). I know I'd never would have thought that someone would go to such lengths and spend so much time to barely scrape out a living while pissing off countless hordes of people. How do you go about creating enough international legislation and cooperation to catch these guys without crippling the internet with regulation? Are third world countries even capable of compliance? All I can think of is that we need something on the level of the UN where tech-heavy countries are given jurisdiction over other nations that don't have the resources needed to police these kinds of things in exchange for a fee , or maybe a guarantee that said nation will dedicate x amount of troops to any areas needing occupation to stop civil war or genocide or something. Am I over-reacting here? I just can't help but think that dealing with this problem without any legal consequence for the spammers is just encouraging and allowing them to come up with ways around whatever solution is currently in place.

    Eh, or I could be completely off my rocker, and just not competent enough to see a simple and effective method of combating these guys.

  • Fud Light (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Loconut1389 ( 455297 ) *
    I do hate it when searching for something about 4-10 pages in a row are purely sites that pretend to have what you're looking for but are merely meta dumps with adwords or other advertising mechanisms on them. Some of them even have valid cached pages. That said, this article, while certainly Fud, is only Fud Light. I personally prefer Fud Dark- at least I can generally laugh at the article's absurdity. This one was more or less just plain retarded.

  • Google Indexing (Score:5, Funny)

    by k4_pacific ( 736911 ) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `cificap_4k'> on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:45PM (#15273262) Homepage Journal
    Some of you might recall that for a long time the Google index stood at around 4 billion pages. It turned out that this was because of the limited number of unique 32 bit index values. To handle this, Google created two index values to reference each each page. One is called the "Selector", and the other is called the "Offset". Simply put, the selector is left shifted by 4 bits and added to the offset so that Google can find any page on the internet simply by knowing its selector and offset. According to the article. Google has exhausted these values as well, and will introduce something called "protected mode page rank" where the slector is shifted farther to create a greater range of values.
    • They need to move from GoogleV4 to GoogleV6, which uses 128 bit addressing. Of course, the addresses are trickier.
    • Google has exhausted these values as well, and will introduce something called "protected mode page rank" where the slector is shifted farther to create a greater range of values.

      Don't forget the modifiers NEAR, FAR, and HUGE.

      Enjoy,
    • Wow :)

      I wonder how many people even here on Slashdot remember the real mode memory "model"

      Anyway, 40Gi pages ought to be enough for everyone :)

      (40Gi is to 64Gi what 640Ki is to 1Mi if anyone wonders...)
    • You mean segment, not selector (in your real/v86 mode analogue). Selectors only came in with protected mode. Personally, that small incorrect detail entirely ruined the joke for me.
    • >"protected mode page rank" where the slector is shifted farther to create a greater range of values.

      No, not shifted farther to the left -- it's used as an index into a table of base addresses. Silly!

  • Right (Score:3)

    by chazzf ( 188092 ) <(cfulton) (at) (deepthought.org)> on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:45PM (#15273264) Homepage Journal
    So says Andrew Orlowski. Remind me why we take him seriously?
    • Because of all his insightful comments about wikipedia?

      Really, though, slashdot is addicted to trolls and flamebaits.

  • There is an obvious solution (Score:3, Funny)

    by shoma-san ( 739914 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @04:47PM (#15273278)
    Do what I do when the toilet bowl is full of crap - FLUSH.
  • Unrelated to the main body of the article, but the "OneWebDay" mentioned in the snippet at the bottom describes a symbol as "Three middle fingers outstretched with the thumb and little finger touching". Since when have web developers been associated with The Scout Movement?

  • One idea? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 955301 ( 209856 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @05:17PM (#15273471) Journal

    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:One idea? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by IamTheRealMike ( 537420 )
      How does a moderator prove they are in fact a legit human and not a bot?

      I foresee a time when to access large parts of the net you will be required to use some central "proof of life" system. The current mish-mash of captchas isn't working. We have custom English captchas on a forum I admin and it doesn't seem to stop the bots: presumably when they get stuck they call for help.

      It's hard to believe a third of Googles index is auto-generated crap, but then I couldn't really believe the "50% of net traffi

    • Re:One idea? (Score:2, Informative)

      by humble.fool ( 961528 )

      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.

    • Google is supposed to index the internet. The searcher is supposed to get an list of sites that are of likely interest based on the search criterea. If google starts to say this site is good and this site is bad, based on it's own metrics, that is censorship. Likewise, if humans have a direct impact on the results, that is also censorship.

      Now, we do know that some people, mostly persons looking to maximize their click through advertising, will make a page appear to be useful for a certain search result

    • 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.

      It sounds noble in theory, but in practice it doesn't work so well.

      A bunch of phony moderations will boost the pages of ads. Only allowing users with logins to rate results won't save you; the spammers will simply create millions (yes, millions) of bogus accounts, farm them to improve their "karma" the

  • If google and the spammers have an arms race... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by s-gen ( 890660 ) on Friday May 05, 2006 @05:18PM (#15273486)
    ...then eventually the spam sites will actually contain the information you were looking for.
  • Money. As long as the internet was predominantly non-commercial, it was peachy. Remember the days? About 15 years ago? The net was great.

    Then money came. dot-com came. And the turd started hitting the fans.

    Now, I'm not saying to "outlaw" making money on the net. As much as I'd enjoy the "free and open" net of the old days, without people making (or hoping to make) money from the internet, we would still be hanging on dialup and paying inane amounts of cash for it. But it's time for some radical changes.

    1. E

    • Careful... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Skadet ( 528657 )
      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 effectiv
      • Nice idea. May I be present when you try to convince a French/German/Dutch... hoster in English to pull an account? Or, even better, a Russian one?

        Let's put it that way: I'm pretty sure the hoster gets the idea fairly quickly.
  • Can a concept similar to BlueFrogs be utilized for weeding out these sites? For example a toolbar in Firefox that allows you to tag sites as spam and the results being transmitted to Google / Yahoo etc (any that want them) and they could incorporate those results in reducing weightage of a site? Or to take it a step further a la BlueFrog actually accumulate those results daily / hourly and complain to the host / registrar etc?
    • I think that's brilliant, or at least the only workable solution.

      Gmail (and others) have a "Mark as SPAM" button, and now that button should be extended to the entire web.

      But it can only be in the google toolbar, and similar toolbars, and not many users have them installed, or do they?

      And then is the whole "I will report as SPAM my competition's home page" issue.
  • I don't know if that's related but I noticed that googling for "en" stopped rendering en.wikipedia.org as the first match. I used to just type "en" in the firefox address bar to go there. Now I have to type the whole name or use bookmarks.
  • are the problem. Here's what google needs to do: Every page that has Viagra or Cialis, immediately gets purged. It then will need to add page rendering so it can render pages and then do some sort of pattern matching to look for anything graphic or otherwise that might vaguely be mistaken for viagra or cialis, and nix those pages as well.

    Okay, so the people who actually want information on viagra or cialis will have to resort to the old fasioned way, watching TV, but at least that fixes the internet.
  • I beleive Alexa tried this, google might want to reimplement this...

    When google bar installed and you are logged into google (gmail or anything) put a little button there :

    Rate this site : Search engine spam, good info, mediocre ... etc etc ...

    yes I would click on it (if it is a function that does not take me to 30 other sites and require me to log -in ///

    It is time we start using our custeomers/visitors/human feedback. ANYONE can generate content from other sites. Just wget whatever. html stip it, mix w
  • 10 years ago (or more) my bbs (pcboard) had a very cool feature :

    when new users signed up, old user rated the user upon a question form and decided : stay or go ...
    that worked with 100 people or so (small BBS)

    now the net and google is a BIG BBS .... so rate the damn sites .... put a "this site is good content" "shis site is random shit" on the results, so you can click (ajax so it just leaves you on the same page) ...

    user interaction is good, bots are dumb and if you have 100+ sites with different

Slashdot Top Deals

This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian

Close