MS Research Automates Search Engine Spam Hunt

Barbie Dollar writes "Researchers at Microsoft are working on an ambitious new project to hunt down and neutralize large-scale search engine spammers. The project, called Strider Search Defender, automates the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis. The project integrates technology from two previous Microsoft Research prototypes (Strider HoneyMonkey and Strider URL Tracer) and promises a new approach to removing junk results from search engine queries."

Comments

Go Microsoft!

[eebra82]

All major search engines have been doing this for quite some time. Google is probably the best hunter of them all and the most recent update, which occured on June 27, banned a large number of spammers who had billions of sites indexed. Unfortunately, the war on spam is quite difficult. They spammers are working with non-content pages but it is a matter of time before they start generating non-jibberish content to spam with, too.

Hopefully, Microsoft's approach will give some effect and push other operators to work harder on preventing the web spam.

Amusingly, you're most likely getting affected only if you're searching for penis pumps, pornographic content and gambling.