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Microsoft Spam The Almighty Buck The Internet

Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages 135

Posted by Zonk from the going-from-point-a-to-z74 dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on New York Times, Microsoft researchers have discovered tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements. While most of us have run across them from time to time, the company researchers have found the pages are deliberately generated in vast numbers by a small group of shadowy operators. By following the money trail, Microsoft researchers were able to track the flow from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers. Many use Google's blogspot.com to set up spam doorway pages. 'The practice has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients' Web traffic -- a field known as search-engine optimization -- from undermining their page-ranking systems. Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.' The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page."
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Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages More

Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

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  • The easy way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:43AM (#18413315) Homepage Journal
    They could have saved a lot of time and money by just visiting forums like DigitalPoint. These doorways and other spammy sites are for sale every day. It's no secret.

  • Bring out the torches and pitchforks! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was actually surprised to find their "what to do" points so simple and to the point.

  • another ripoff (Score:4, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:46AM (#18413353)
    Man. This Microsoft project is just a ripoff of Google's Gandalf Search Wizard project...

    • Re:another ripoff (Score:5, Funny)

      by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@gm a i l . com> on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:51AM (#18413419) Journal

      The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page.

      Man. This Microsoft project is just a ripoff of Google's Gandalf Search Wizard project...
      Yeah, but let's not forget that even before that was AOL's Smeagol Browser Gollum project ...

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by lostboy2 ( 194153 )

        The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page.

        Man. This Microsoft project is just a ripoff of Google's Gandalf Search Wizard project...

        Yeah, but let's not forget that even before that was AOL's Smeagol Browser Gollum project
        When I was a kid, all we had was the U of Minnesota's Sauron Gopher Overlord project...

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by CurtisAutery ( 1034668 )

          The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page.

          Man. This Microsoft project is just a ripoff of Google's Gandalf Search Wizard project...

          Yeah, but let's not forget that even before that was AOL's Smeagol Browser Gollum project

          When I was a kid, all we had was the U of Minnesota's Sauron Gopher Overlord project...

          You had Gopher as a kid!? Man, we were stuck with local BBS Sam & Frodo's ASCII Express Second Breakfast project.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jagdish ( 981925 )
        yeah, but before that there was Chuck Norris' Walker Texas Ranger project.
    • Register.com among the Businesses, Melbourne IT to the Australians; Tucows I was in my youth that is forgotten, in the South ENom, in the North GoDaddy, to the East I go not...
  • I fully expect to see an improvement in my search results ... for about five minutes, until the SEO spammers crank out their next method of making the Internet less efficient.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jackv ( 1068006 )
      Very ambivalent , i.e the difference between a pure doorway page and an "apparent" information page with advertisements , all over it

  • Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Herkum01 ( 592704 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:48AM (#18413379)
    Is it really cheaper to use Page Ranking companies instead of just well, PAYING for an advertisement on Google or MSN or something?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:52AM (#18413433)

      Is it really cheaper to use Page Ranking companies instead of just well, PAYING for an advertisement on Google or MSN or something?
      Yes, or they wouldn't do it.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's incredibly naive. You don't honestly think that all companies work at 100% efficiency do you?

      • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

        by fruey ( 563914 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:11AM (#18413683) Homepage Journal
        The average return on investment on Search Engine Optimisation (generally: increasing your search position on specific keywords relevant to your business) can be about 10x more than the return on keyword purchasing, which can cost 0.30c - several dollars. Every click costs money.

        Once you've optimised to your keywords in "natural search" e.g. *free* results, then your investment keeps paying (you need to maintain positions of course, but this is lower cost, especially if you're in a niche) whereas in paid advertising you have to keep giving money to Google and, in competitive industries, your cost per click will be subject to significant inflation...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey ( 83763 )
        Sometimes businesses do stuff that doesn't work out -- they go bankrupt everyday.

      • People trust organic search results more, so even if they were more expensive to buy than paid for adverts, you'd get more bang for your buck.

        People who click on adverts are less likely to 'convert' (buy and item, sign up for a newsletter etc) than people who click on a natural search result

        Spam sucks bad, but if you can get into the top 20 of googles natural search, you have hit gold.

        monk.e.boy

    • it may not be cheaper, but it may be more effective. search engines generally identify results that were purchased, and i'm sure a user is less like to click on it if they see that. the clients of these companies are buying their way into the results without have to be in that section.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by terraformer ( 617565 ) <tpb@pervici.com> on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:42AM (#18414093) Journal
      It is also more effective. How many times do you click on ads? Now how many times do you click on search results? 'nough said...

  • "time to time"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:49AM (#18413391)

    While most of us have run across them from time to time...

    Time to time? For mee it seems like more than 50% when I scan the search results. Maybe less, maybe more, but certainly more than "time to time". For many of my searches, I may not find anything truly relevant until the second and third page. People have learned how to play Google to the point where more and more Windows Live is starting to give better results (scary!).

    • Maybe the best thing to do is to automatically skip to the 2nd page of results and write off the first page as search engine spam.
      • No I don't agree with this, people like myself have businesses that have optimised web sites ( I am in the Miami rental market ), we target exactly a few words and nothing more. most of my business is organic and I don't rank any higher than 5 ( would love to have 2 or 3 rank) but I get enough traffic that I am happy and keep my little building full.

        I hate those spam-my web sites ( the top 4 other sites ) because they keep people away from my site and a few others that have vacation rentals here in Miami.

        On

    • True enough. I recently switched back to Yahoo! search after about five years of nothing but Google. I don't know if the results are any better, but it sure is a good change of pace.

    • I have never seen results that bad. You must be searching for porn, where spam is to be expected.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Frosty Piss ( 770223 )

        I have never seen results that bad. You must be searching for porn, where spam is to be expected.

        I beg your pardon... "Erotica" is a perfictly legitimate subject.

  • they harvested most of their results from Google.

  • Nice work (Score:5, Informative)

    by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:53AM (#18413449) Journal
    There's actually some pretty decent research here. The site cloning report is a good read.

    http://research.microsoft.com/SearchRanger/Spam_At tack_by_Website_Clones.htm [microsoft.com]

    The cloning of popular blogs as been a scourge for a while now, both for manipulating search engines and good old fashioned advertising - using someone else's content to draw visitors in

    • Nice work (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kad77 ( 805601 )
      Thanks for a informative post. Beats the typical whiny M$ iz S4T4|\| crap.

      Google does keep up, but quietly- anecdotally, last week I was searching for a certain spec ARM9 dev board (the VULCAN-Lite) with USD also as a search term and all kinds of fake keyword sites and eastern block bride services were in the top 20 results.

      I sent Google feedback with my search terms (VULCAN-Lite +USD), explained what spam was popping up, and as I write this comment a few days later-- the Google search comes back clean (emp

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by onepoint ( 301486 )
        You are 100% correct that Google does help clean up it's searches. I do about 100 web searches a day to learn stuff, every time I come across spammy results I send Google a note. I think it's working, because the next week when I want to learn more on a topic it's much improved

        • You are 100% correct that Google does help clean up it's searches.

          Hmm, I always had the impression that they use the feedback to seed a database of pages to test their spam-removal algorithms on. They claim that they "prefer automated solutions rather than manual removal".

          One of my big annoyances is sites that are spidered by Google but require mere mortal visitors to purchase a subscription. For example, searches on certain technical subjects often return pages with IEEE publications - purchase this art

          • In reference to web master world issues with search engines. the discussion has been more than once discussed. basic registration get you most of the issues you want to learn, the paid subscriptions get you into the special area's.

            you have to understand that his servers were consistently being spider-ed and his bandwidth cost were way high. kill all spiders was his first thing then he made special changes.

            Onepoint.

            • you have to understand that his servers were consistently being spider-ed and his bandwidth cost were way high. kill all spiders was his first thing then he made special changes.

              That's all fine with me, but then block Googlebot as well. Allowing Googlebot and not allowing 80% of the world population is called cloaking in my dictionary and Google should have removed the whole site from the index for that reason.

              • he did block Google. that's well document.

                >>Allowing Google bot and not allowing 80% of the world population is called cloaking in my dictionary

                no, if you read all the issues, most people could see his site, very few could not because scrapers were coming from those IP's. and 80% ... maybe 30% at tops and north america - europe - had full access.

                anyway here is the view point from brett : http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051128-1616 06 [searchenginewatch.com]

                • no, if you read all the issues, most people could see his site, very few could not because scrapers were coming from those IP's.

                  I have read the stories about "we have a long list of blocked IP addresses and all the horrible bots are using my bandwidth". Brett Tabke is a liar. I have tried accessing his site from many different (static!) IPs in different /16 blocks and they were all blocked. Tabke's business model is to have an ad-free website and charge $180 per year for access to the site. He wants to att

      • Yeah, Google are pretty good at cleaning up. My blog got hammered by a russian spammer and after some complaints, his sites began to vanish from Google. Good thing really since his host (Everyone's Internet) had no interest in shutting him down - despite the fact that he was using some pretty nasty hidden code on his sites to spam forums and blogs whenever his pages were loaded using IE.
    • Here's a thought: why can't search spiders be a bit smarter, and discard any links on a page that are set to "display: none"? Or, better yet, why not flag them as potentially abusive? I realize there are legitimate reasons for hiding a link with the CSS display attribute if you're using dynamic HTML, but I'd venture to guess the majority of hidden links are used for search engine manipulation.

      Of course, the scammers would just try some other tactic -- perhaps hiding links in Z-layers behind opaque graphic

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by oni ( 41625 )
        discard any links on a page that are set to "display: none"

        I bet the spammers would just start using really obfuscated javascript to set the style = display:none. So, you'd be starting an arms race where search spiders would have to start processing javascript and then the spammers would just come up with something else (maybe set the z-index low so that the links can't be seen). It just doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

        I use display:none all the time by the way. The left column of slashdot has th
    • While I'll forever be a free software advocate I do need to give proper recognition for a good and true endeavor by the other team:

      By following the money trail, Microsoft researchers were able to track the flow from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers.
      Someone needs to take a similar approach to find out where taxpayer money has been going while we've been in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  • Then Microsoft realized... (Score:5, Funny)

    by physicsboy500 ( 645835 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:55AM (#18413465)

    It's coming from inside the building!!!

  • PageRank is designed to be resistant to exactly this sort of attack. The amount of Google karma you get is proportional to the karma of the pages that link to you. Creating lots of pages with no karma that link to you therefore shouldn't do you any good at all. Why do they bother?

    Theories:

    (1) There's a subtle way that it helps I haven't spotted yet, perhaps to do with non-PageRank elements of Google's search ordering

    (2) This is all done by a very few companies because they are the few that don't understa

    • Re:How does this help them? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:02AM (#18413581) Homepage Journal
      It works because you don't realize the size of this thing. They're talking about millions of fake pages here, lots of them pointing at other fake pages to raise their pagerank so they can in turn point at yet more pages. You would think Google would have someone seeking these kind of sites out and applying a discount on their domain though (although when that happens the spammers just move on anyway).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Paul Crowley ( 837 )
        Er, that sounds like the old saw "we lose a penny on each one sold, but we make it up in volume".

        If there's only so much karma going into your pages, there's only so much karma they have to give, no matter how huge it is. A trillion pages pointing at my page won't increase its karma, if those trillion have no karma to give.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by FooAtWFU ( 699187 )
          Presumably some of these trillion pages have a karma greater than or equal to epsilon.

          The scummiest part of it all is that some of the pages in question will be on domains that someone let expire and someone else immediately snatched up. They get their PageRank from the sites that linked to the formerly legitimate domain. And if that was your domain name, and you only let it expire accidentally, well, sucks to be you. :(

      • Still, they need non-fake input to stay afloat. A billion links from worthless sites won't do my pagerank much good.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by volsung ( 378 )

      Every page has to start with some small, intrinsic amount of karma, otherwise there would be none to pass around. By creating enough bogus pages, you can aggregate some amount of link karma to bestow on the site of your choosing. In principle, I guess this would devalue everyone's PageRank too (kind of like printing money), but for a while it could be profitable.

      The second hole is the popularity of websites with user-generated content. Lots of highly ranked websites (like /. in fact) allow anyone, or

      • Every page has to start with some small, intrinsic amount of karma, otherwise there would be none to pass around.

        There has to be a "root set", but that root set doesn't have to consist of all pages. There's some evidence that it includes all top-level pages, because the Scientologists experimented with creating zillions of top-level domains to increase their Google ranking. But ordinary pages, as I understand it, have no intrinsic karma at all.

        Yeah, blog SEO spam is a great evil irritant. I do understand

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jdoeii ( 468503 )
      Creating lots of pages with no karma that link to you therefore shouldn't do you any good at all

      That's not how it works. You assume it's a zero-sum game, but it's not. Every page gets some weight even if no one links to it. It's small, but it's positive. When one page links to another, the weight of the source page is reduced less than the target page gains. So, here is the business plan:
      1. Make a lot of unique pages (G in the PR calculation joins identical or nearly identical pages)
      2. Crosslink them in a n
      • Every page gets some weight even if no one links to it. It's small, but it's positive.

        That's not the impression I'm under - I thought that most pages were not part of Google's "root set". See my reply here:

        http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227331&thresho ld=1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&pid=18413697#184137 87 [slashdot.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jdoeii ( 468503 )
          That's not the impression I'm under - I thought that most pages were not part of Google's "root set"

          I understand that you have such an impression, but that's a wrong impression. Every page gets a non-zero weight by default. If you think about it you will see that your scheme just would not work: emerging subjects/sites would stay with zero PR for a long long time until links to them propagate all the way to the "roots".
          • Since the answer is a closely guarded secret within Google, it's always fun to be contradicted by someone speaking in authoritative tone of voice who knows as little about this as I do :-)

            You're mistaken about your argument against, in any case; PageRank itself is public information, so I can tell you that it does not have the property you assign to it. There's a delay between a link being made and Google spidering and discovering it, but the eigenvector calculation at the heart of PageRank will propogate

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jdoeii ( 468503 )
              who knows as little about this as I do

              How do you know that?

              I can tell you that it does not have the property you assign to it

              The delay I mentioned is due to links being made, not links being discovered. Think about some small community of scientists making an almost closed cluster of sites about their niche research subject.

              • Oooh, hints of dark and secret knowledge! Those are always very impressive.

                The delay I mentioned is due to links being made, not links being discovered. Think about some small community of scientists making an almost closed cluster of sites about their niche research subject.

                There is simply no way for Google to know that those pages are any good until people start linking to them. Fortunately it doesn't take long - for example, the scientists will get karma from the links from their institution front page

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by jdoeii ( 468503 )
                  Oooh, hints of dark and secret knowledge!

                  It's only dark and secret for a newbie

                  There is simply no way for Google to know that those pages are any good until people start linking to them.

                  Exactly, except turned upside down. It's "there is no way for Google to know that those pages are spam", so they get positive weight until proven otherwise.

                  from the links from their institution front pages

                  A few links will make the cluster discoverable by crawlers but won't make a difference for PR. It's the cross links withi
    • our site is actually working with one of these companies (on the receiving end of the paycheck, though). they want to put "ads" on our site that link to other sites. they dont care at all what the ads look like or where they are on the page, but just that there's a link to another site. and the link has to be search-indexable (no javascript). all they care about is boosting the rank of their clients, not the number of clicks.

  • And? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jafiwam ( 310805 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @08:58AM (#18413523) Homepage Journal
    Ok. Forgive me if MS just discovering this makes me think they just entered 2002. That crap is _not_ new folks.

    On the other hand, what idiot spouts off about two hosting companies being responsible without naming them? Seriously. This isn't Fark, you can't get kicked off for calling some asshole out.

    • Re:And? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Sirch ( 82595 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:05AM (#18413627) Homepage
      ... but you can get sued for libel if you're wrong.
    • but the best bit: Phillip Rosenthal, chief technology officer of one of the companies, ISPrime, an Internet services company based in New York, said the activity had been traced to a single customer and violated the company's acceptable-use policy. He said the company's relationship with the customer, whom he would not identify, had been severed

      so, one down, one to go. Its still a shame the offending company was not named, but I imagine it doesn't exist anymore, wound up and is now reborn as a differently n

  • And in other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:00AM (#18413553) Homepage Journal
    Microsoft researchers have discovered tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements.

    In other news, Microsoft researchers have discovered that the sky is blue and that water is wet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Smuffe ( 152444 )
      Microsoft researchers have discovered that the sky is blue

      I live in London, you insensetive clod!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by et764 ( 837202 )

      In other news, Microsoft researchers have discovered that the sky is blue and that water is wet.

      Discovering that the sky is blue is quite a discovery for a company based near Seattle. They should have known about water though, given all the rain they get.

  • Obligatory Bill Hicks (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thaelon ( 250687 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:11AM (#18413685)
    Obligatory Bill Hicks...

    If you work in advertising, kill yourself.
    --Bill Hicks - Another Dead Hero

  • Bad neighborhoods (Score:3, Interesting)

    by condour75 ( 452029 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:13AM (#18413699) Homepage
    Google is already developing methods to deal with clusters of these fakes. Usually they're scraping web directories and databases. I've seen a lot of this lately, searching for dental hygiene schools for my girlfriend. Usually they're linking to each other, even if they're huge clusters. Legit SEO guys (yes, there are consultants who actually try to get your site linked legitimately and by hand) call these areas "bad neighborhoods". Whatever Google's doing, though, clearly isn't enough, and a lot of these guys are using adsense to make money. Martinibuster's [martinibuster.net] got a few good links on the subject.

  • A few years ago... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AliasTheRoot ( 171859 ) on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:22AM (#18413815)
    ...a friend of mine figured he could get great Google listings by autogenerating trashy link farm pages, he had the top 1000 porn search terms all cunningly mispelled, ie "Brittney Spares" and hundreds of thousands of static pages all linking into each other across a bunch of subdomains. For about a year we reckoned he had some stupid percentage of all porn listings in Google, and in that time he made around $1,000,000 from banner clicks. Eventually Google caught onto it and blocked his sites enmass, but he'd made enough to buy some property by then.

  • Microsoftie wearing a white hat? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CodeShark ( 17400 ) <ellsworthpc AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @09:24AM (#18413839) Homepage
    I just finished reading how much the Strider group at M$ has accomplished and how, and it is rather amazing. They lifted the covers off of typo-domain squatters exploiting Google's programs, a progressive honeypot setup that detects which levels of XP are attackable by different mal-ware attacks (up to and including reporting zero-day exploits if the latest "patch hardened" machine is exploited], and now this project. Even better, they are publishing the "how", and any OS (AKA Mac OS or any of the Linux distros) could benefit by using similar approaches on even more machines.

    So -- from an admitted open source advocate -- here's a rare kudo to the giant in Redmond for keeping a "white hat" and his group -- and letting them work.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheViewFromTheGround ( 607422 )
      I agree. Whatever else you say about MS, and there's lots to say, they seem to have given their security researchers a lot of freedom and because of their size and power have the resources and brainpower to tackle these problems in pretty cool ways. The sad thing, as with much of what comes out from MS, is that you see these really smart, awesome people doing great work, but when it comes to taking their own advice, you can see quite directly the way that the vast bureaucracy and Microsoft's avaricious co
    • Microsoft Research has always done great things. Check out their graphics research [microsoft.com] or their Singularity OS [microsoft.com]. Microsoft Research is almost like a completely independent entity.
  • I read the research paper a couple days ago after reading about it in the NY Times. Seeing how this research is Microsoft funded and implicates Google, claiming they're syndicators are in cooperation with the spammers, one has to question researcher bias. I'd like to see a peer-reviewed and independently verified article before accepting these outrageous claims. Note that the researchers focused on a few keywords and strictly limited the scope of their efforts. This doesn't mean the findings are untrue, it

  • Firefox is good. (Score:2, Informative)

    by wetelectric ( 956671 )
    Firefox has an extension called customizegoogle [customizegoogle.com]. It adds a 'filter' option to a google results page. Allows one to filter out the sneaky pages that hi-jack your search query.
  • I look at these situations much like I looks at people that cheat welfare systems and such. So many people spend so much time figuring out how to cheat a system, I wonder if that same time was spent trying to work the system the right way how much of a difference in the net outcome it would be...
  • What was the point of this effort? To improve its own search results? To show up Google?
  • No wonder Microsoft never has any real innovation.
  • What if I want MY page to just be a sea of ads? I setup the code, I did the work, why can't I show what I want? It's not my fault that Google misreads my page or gives someone else a higher ranking because of it. I'm sure there are whole boatload of sites that could be deemed "junk", but out here in the digital wild west, I'm free to do what I want on my 10MB of free space....Aren't I?
  • This didn't make microsoft sound nearly evil enough for /.
  • "Microsoft Strider Search Ranger"? Come on now. Are they turning to japanime/manga naming conventions? How long until: Microsoft Laser Super Action Happy Extreme START!!!!! Microsoft Real Swift Rainbow Sunshine Police Now LOVE!!!! This is taking the concept of branding into its exact opposite. And then you have things like, Apple TV. And you wonder why MSFT is tanking.
  • 10,000 pages??? Geez, I want to work for microsoft, those guys make wally look industrious http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=allinurl%3Adm xargs&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]
  • Given the report in The Register [theregister.co.uk] today, the researchers could have been better off using Live.com as their search engine for researching this topic.

    Seriously, I have had phishing email for some of these 80.77.x.y websites recently as well. A "Good on ya!" to MicroSoft [microsoft.com] & UC Davis [ucdavis.edu]! Root the bastards out and stomp 'em!

  • welcome to the social, MS

  • Timing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jeichels ( 805414 )
    I think it is funny timing how we turned down a $73k/month in advertising last night from one of the top three spam supporting syndicators. They were seeking a $1.16 per average click through.

    I am very glad I read the detailed report from end to end. We seek value in advertising, not spam, but it is very difficult for well meaning companies to figure out which is which. You shouldn't have to be a rocket scientist to differentiate the deceptive tactics/companies from the valid ones. I guess most forms

  • This is good work by Microsoft. They've tracked down a few big-time web spammers, all the way up the food chain. But there are more.

    We've been working on the web spam problem, from a different angle. Our starting point is the legal requirement that a business cannot be anonymous. Every legitimate business must have an identifiable person or corporation behind it. (See CA B&P code sec. 17358 [sitetruth.com], ("disclosure of ... legal name and address information shall appear on ... the first screen displayed ...

  • Anyone who makes a website, no matter who considers it "junk" still is not forcing or spamming any serach engine. In order to be listed in a search engine, they (the search engines) must send out its crawlers in a search for websites...If a SE(s) end up listing a "junk" website in thier search engine becuase their SE crawler found it in the endless boundrys of cyberspace...thats not the owner of the so called "junk" web site(s) problem...nor it should it be.

    There is NO SUCH thing as "spamming a Search En

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