Solving Google's Spam Problem

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:33:07 -0800

This is in response to a post on Conrad Egusa’s blog, Marketing Startups.

Two search engines (one of them being Microsoft’s Bing, which now powers Yahoo) are incorporating Facebook’s social graph into part of their search results. What this means is that in the future, if someone searches “MBA Admissions” and their friends “Like” an MBA admissions Facebook Page, then the user will be able to see that in the search results (and will most likely be drawn to that link).

I agree that whoever has the largest market share will always be the target. Similar to how Windows has more viruses despite the fact that it is more secure than OS X [1].

But what I’m worried about using peer reviews (i.e. “likes”) from Facebook friends is that while it seems like a good idea, it might be harder to implement. This is due mostly to the problem of Facebook worms having the ability to proliferate through social networks (e.g. the latest “like to see your first update”). All it takes is an extra line of code.

Another possible solution would be to give users who have had a Google Account for at least 6 months (to prevent spammers) the ability to blacklist spam websites in their search results. Google could then take this blacklist and develop an algorithm utilizing the metadata found on these websites and filter out future search results; or they could simply filter them immediately through some sort of review/approval process. However the latter is more unlikely with Google’s large search volume. An example of this is Twitter’s “Block and Report as Spam” feature.

[1] http://danielmiessler.com/blog/mac-vs-pc-security-in-one-sentence

DrivenThought

Solving Google's Spam Problem