Google Reacts to Splogs

labnol writes "Recently, Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs. Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam and another feature called Flag As Objectionable where users can report blogs with questionable content. Google appears to be listening."

Comments

I can see it now..

[pickyouupatnine]

.. Blogger getting bombarded by all sorts of "Questionable Content" flags from all sorts of extremely left / right / PC people ... soon they won't be able to keep up w/ the flags and will just turn off the feature.. :-/

Re:I can see it now..

[svkal]

Actually, this probably won't be too much of a problem if they base their system on ratios rather than individual complaints, which I assume they will given the huge number of individual flaggings that will necessarily take place.

The ratio of flaggings to unique visitors in a given timeframe will generally be higher for spam than controversial opinions. This is because people are more likely to report sites that will actually be deleted, instead of pointless political demonstrations to a one-man audience of some random Blogger employee, and because there is no significant number of unique visitors to a spam site that "agree" with the site's content(as there generally is for a political blog).

So, for normal circumstances, having an employee periodically go through the sites with the highest flagging ratios will give pretty good results.

Now, one could also expect campaigning, i.e. higher-traffic sites directing their audience to report lower-traffic sites with "undesirable opinions", but this could only be done for a manageable number of sites. These, after being inspected to make sure that they actually are not spam, could be flagged with an 'innocent' flag by the employee, exempting them from further inspection(after all, political blogs aren't likely to suddenly turn into spam blogs).

Indian image-word-verification workers

[SuperBanana]

Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam

I once spoke with the VP of a company that was merging with the company I was doing contract work for (both companies were very small, so we had a lunchroom chat).

He revealed that there were a number of "email blast" (ie email spam outsourcers) that were happy to have dozens of Indian employees on staff ready to do the image-word verification and reply-to-this-email-to-be-whitelisted emails many think-they're-super-smart people had set up.

Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...

*Blogger* is the worst offender in blog spamming?

[John Jorsett]

That's like saying convenience stores are the worst offenders in armed robbery. Surely the offender is the perpetrator, not the victim.

So what happens when Rush Lambaugh gets flaged?

[Herschel Cohen]

Upon reading some of his comments verbatim it is shocking how inarticulate and rambling he is. Seems reasonable to me to label him as radio SPAM - he certainly has the figure for it.

How difficult is it for Google?

[SilentReallySilentUs]

Is it really that difficult for Google? In addition to the website caches, they have the complete Deja archive at their disposal to train any kind of learning software. Plus, this problem is already solved in Gmail. I agree it hurts when you just spent a few hours writing a blog and the first message you get is "Wow that is really nice! I will read it again. Please see my mortgate site here ..."