Google Warns About Search-Spammer Site Hacking

Al writes "The head of Google's Web-spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, warned last week that spammers are hacking more and more poorly secured websites in order to 'game' search-engine results. At a conference on information retrieval, held in Boston, Cutts also discussed how Google deals with the growing problem of search spam. 'I've talked to some spammers who have large databases of websites with security holes,' Cutts said. 'You definitely see more Web pages getting linked from hacked sites these days. The trend has been going on for at least a year or so, and I do believe we'll see more of this [...] As operating systems become more secure and users become savvier in protecting their home machines, I would expect the hacking to shift to poorly secured Web servers.' Garth Bruen, creator of the Knujon software that keeps track of reported search spam, added that some campaigns involve creating up to 10,000 unique domain names."

Comments

And what about search farms?

[vintagepc]

I don't know about you, but something else that REALLY annoys me is pages that contain lists of words just so they come up on many searches... with no actual content. Or sites like "Buy *search term* at low prices" and they don't even sell what you're looking for. What's being done about those?

Universal Authentication

[ParticleGirl]

I found this pretty interesting: "Authentication [across the Web] would be really nice," says Tunkelang. "The anonymity of the Internet, as valuable as it is, is also the source of many of these ills." Having to register an e-mail before you can comment on a blog is a step in this direction, he says, as is Twitter's recent addition of a "verified" label next to profiles it has authenticated."

The idea of universal authentication has been tossed around for a while. I feel like the biggest drawback is privacy (we'd have to trust some universal authentication system to hold onto some identifier even if posting anonymously) and the biggest obstacle is the need for universal participation. It's kind of too late to make an opt-in system. But I've liked the idea ever since early sci-fi interwebs (read: Ender's Game) had SOME kind of authentication.

Confirmation

[Drakkenmensch]

Anyone who frequently uses google knows this already. Plug in any kind of search and you're bound to get a slew of crap results along the lines of:

Download [term] full version

Torrent [term] keygen

Torrent [term] latest version

Torrent [term] hacked no-cd

You'll get those even when searching for books.

Re:Confirmation

[IBBoard]

Except that that's not what the summary mentions. The summary is talking about people hacking websites to get more "good" links to their site, rather than having to rely on standard link farms that are then blacklisted. It's like comment spam, only with hacking of servers instead.