Search Engine Optimization Poisoning Way Up In '10

alphadogg writes "Cybercrooks continue to abuse the Web, boosting their ability to produce what's called search engine optimization poisoning so that individuals making use of search engines such as Google's increasingly are ending up with choices that are dangerous malware-laden URL links. Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday. That's in comparison to 13.7% of Google searches having that outcome in the latter half of 2009, says Patrik Runald, Websense senior manager of security research."

Comments

Link to Actual Report and My Many Gripes

[eldavojohn]

You can find the actual Websense Threat Report in ASP-driven HTML here. I mention ASP because the video doesn't seem to be functioning correctly in my non-IE browser.

I thought I would find this in the NetworkWorld article. Boy was I mistaken. As I switch between the two pages of the article, I am presented with "Whitepaper" links to reports that then navigate me to a 'page1234' at accelacomm.com where it asks for all my personal information. In the middle of the article (with no indication this has nothing to do with the article) is a link to another NetworkWorld article titled 'Royal pain: British Royal Navy site hacked.' Shouldn't that go in the 'Related Content' section that is also in the article with links to how I can 'bail out my budget'? Oh look, they've hyperlinked phrases in the article that just direct me to another NetworkWorld article and at the end I get directed to their security section. Might they take a chance and link to the source of the information that they are considering an authority on SEO poisoning? So you know, I can judge for myself and further inspect the report? I mean, I'm not asking them to drive across town to get a quote from the mayor ... this is the smallest gesture of investigative reporting one could possibly do.

Sorry to rant for so long but it amuses me how a news article about SEO poisoning is obviously taking some questionable routes to up their own stats -- maybe even manipulate Google page ranks? Oh but that's just good old wholesome Search Engine Optimization -- it's those pesky cybercrooks that phish for my home address, not the "esteemed" online news sources we should criticize that ask me to enter it into accelacomm.com when I'm trying to read the news (and I'm not accusing accelacomm of being a scam, just annoyed at the principle).

Re:Link to Actual Report and My Many Gripes

[Shados]

#1: its in asp.net, not asp (big difference)
#2: asp.net doesn't have a dependency on IE. Its browser agnostic (and thus like any other environment used for web development, it works BETTER if you're not using IE)
#3: the video is in Flash using a pretty standard Flash player that has nothing to do with asp.net.
#4: it works just fine in non-IE browsers (I'm using Chrome)

Just figured I'd clear that up.

Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

My search engine optimization goes to '11

Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

At least in my case, I've found that google's search results have gotten progressively more useless over the last 2-3 years.

I search for a linux issue I'm having, the only hits I get are ubuntu users in 2004.

I search for applications for my wife's phone, it's almost 100% adware sites, and 0% useful download links.

My google search usage is going down steadily. If I want to know about a company/famous person/whatever, it's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.

Info on movies, actors, etc? imdb.

Looking for directions? Mapquest. Google maps has gotten me lost on countless occasions. (By doing such things as telling me to get off a highway by crossing the meridian, and exiting on the onramp for the opposite direction.)

I don't know whether it's just me, google has thinned out the effort going into their searches in favour of their (many) other endeavours, or if they're just not evolving as fast as the assholes who want to try and monetize my searches for completely unrelated shit.

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[olsmeister]

By doing such things as telling me to get off a highway by crossing the meridian, and exiting on the onramp for the opposite direction.

Are you sure that it's just poor directions? Have you done anything to piss off Google lately?

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[TheGratefulNet]

google totally sold out and lost their mojo.

I get link farm sites from the first page that SHOULD be weeded out. I search for tech things and get mostly 'buy this!' crap sites.

google chooses to do this. they could do better (they did, once) but now they are no better than any random search engine. worse since their UI is less direct and more junk oriented. we have seen google do a lot of auto-things (animation, auto scrolling of text ads, auto complete, auto-think!) and none of it is really welcomed by the user community.

its just what we all predicted. google would be a golden child for a few years but then it will fizzle out.

its ONLY because of habit that many people still use google. but they are not any better than the rest, these days, and their search seems like a paid service for all the wrong 'content suppliers' (I use that term very loosely).

I wish altavista was back. I miss the old days.

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[Trepidity]

The main thing saving Google's ass these days is that 90% of the time they can just throw up a Wikipedia result in the top-5, and usually that's good enough.

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[FudRucker]

yup, now that Google has their namebrand recognition they dont give a damn anymore as if they left the office with their servers running on autopilot while they are all out vacationing while the revenue rolls in. typical of most companies = they start out with benevolent ideals and once the ball is rolling and the money starts pouring in then it all goes to heck while the owners go out and play rich guy.

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[melikamp]

IMHO, the trash in the Google search is mostly due to spammers: the people who game the page-rank. I agree with eldavojohn: everyone is doing it these days, and the "news" sites are especially notorious. The line is very blurry. I know a dude who works for gather.com, and they are doing it by inserting "keywords" into their news articles. This is not the same as using a botnet to generate traffic, but the goal is the same.

May be the future of search is Bayesian filtering? It is doable even right now: have a local program load 1000 or so Google hits and unleash on them your own personal filter. Everyone heard about spam/ham filtering, but the math and the algorithm extend naturally to any finite number of categories, so a user can create categories such as "spam", "science", "shopping", "blog", "porn", train the filter, and enjoy truly personalized search results. Google is obviously loosing to rank gamers, they are way too smart and too quick to adapt. But a personal Bayesian filter could take the raw index with 90% spam and select results relevant to YOU, while slashing the amount of spam by a couple of orders of magnitude.

My Thunderbird filter works like a charm: in the last year I've had 1 (one) false positive and what feels like less than 5% of false negatives. I think it will work just great on Web pages.

Um, I am resubmitting this, since it's not appearing. Sorry if it's a dupe.

Re:Malware/Spyware isn't the only problem...

[jhigh]

It's probably a combination of the two. Google search results are definitely becoming more useless, and I think as more and more people become familiar with the Internet, their behavior patterns will evolve to reflect this. I think it's not just more specialized web sites like imdb cropping up, but user familiarity with the existence of these sites. As the Internet becomes more and more a part of our daily lives, web sites advertise on television, etc., it's only natural that average users are becoming more familiar with specific web site offerings and foregoing the extra step of typing a search into Google. The (potential) down side to this is what happens when a new, better web site crops up that may be infinitely better than the one that we're all familiar with. For example, once the world became accustomed to using Microsoft Office exclusively because that is what they were the most familiar with, it has become increasingly difficult (if not damn near impossible) for any other product to break into that space.

Is it possible that we will see similar things happening with web sites, where inferior sites are getting all of the hits simply because they are what people became familiar with early on?

Search engine rankings for legitimate sites

[Compaqt]

The annoying thing is when sites that have legitimate and interesting content are ranked nowhere near the spammers.

Many legitimate and useful sites are far and few between. You have to bookmark them because it's doubtful you'll find them again with Google (page 20 or something).

Re:Search engine rankings for legitimate sites

[dkleinsc]

This sounds like a very very familiar discussion. Specifically, we had this exact same problem about 10-15 years ago when search spammers had learned how to game results on Yahoo and AltaVista with stupid meta tags and repeating the same words over and over to increase their ranking.

Google figured out a way to get around that problem, which produced a massively better search engine. It sounds like the search spammers are now figuring out how to game the Google results, so in another year or two we'll be right back in the big mess that Internet search used to be.

Re:Search engine rankings for legitimate sites

[Trepidity]

I think PageRank is ultimately some of the problem, though I hear they've been de-emphasizing it (but it hasn't fixed my searches). When I search for band lyrics, I want the lovingly crafted fan site that's been accumulating information on that band for the past 10 years. When I search for reviews, I want that site too. I don't want mp3lyrics.com for lyrics or allmusic.com for reviews or whatever. But the problem is that each of the good fan sites is a separate entity (which is one reason they're good): one's at joydiv.org, another one's off some person's university webspace, another one's on free hosting somewhere, yet another one's at brainwashed.com or synthpunk.org or whatever. So they each rank lower than mp3lyrics.com or allmusic.com, which have mediocre info for every band on the planet tucked away under their single pagerank unit.

Same with non-music stuff. You're never going to find the person with a great page on blueberry pies; instead you'll get a recipe from eHow.

Re:Search engine rankings for legitimate sites

[theskipper]

Speaking of ehow (Demand Media), here's a great article about how they're junking up the SERPs. It's not just small time link farms, it's industrial strength pollution backed by hundreds of millions of dollars.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/

Google is going to need to take a firm stand. And they most likely want to do it desperately now that there's some real competition. But it's a tough nut to crack and they certainly don't want to upset their applecart (i.e. ad revenues).

Useless Search Content

[ideonexus]

I'm seeing the exact same thing. I find that Google is becoming more and more useless for academic research. I would once type in a subject and get tons of legitimate, informative sites written by people who cared about the subjectmatter (remember ThinkQuest? All those fantastic articles are still out there, they just aren't in Google's search results anymore), which I could use as a springboard into deeper research. Now I get Wikipedia as the first result and fifty pages of forums filled with people who have no idea what their talking about. There's still no algorithm for content quality.

Re:Useless Search Content

[Monkeedude1212]

I'm not sure if this is relevant - but perhaps you should be using google Scholar for your academic research. It's possible that they segregrated what information you're looking for into that section.

But then again, maybe not - I don't know what kind of research you do (and I've never had a problem with springboarding with a Wikipedia article...)

Re:Useless Search Content

[TheRaven64]

Not necessarily. Google Scholar will only find peer-reviewed papers (not very competently, and omitting much of the information required to find where it was originally published), but I find reading researchers' blogs often turns up more interesting stuff. It often takes 1-2 years between doing the work and having a journal paper published (and another little while for Google Scholar to notice it), so a blog post from a decent researcher about his or her current work will tell you stuff now that won't appear in Google Scholar results for 2-3 years.

Re:Google Can Ban Sites, So...

[Antony T Curtis]

Probably because malware organisations have discovered an ancient and dark evil who would further their cause ... for a price.

They're called: Lawyers.

What are they searching for?

[sudnshok]

The article is not clear what search terms produced 22% malicious URLs. That seems like a high number to me. If you search for "photoshop crack" or "keygen" you're going to get WAY more malware than searching for "fuzzy bunnies".

While I agree that more spam and malware sites have gotten into Google listings, I don't think the problem is quite as dire as the article makes it seem for the typical Google user.

JS:DR

[PPH]

Article requires JavaScript: Didn't read.

Need to vote or rank results...

[seanvaandering]

They really need to create a ranking system for logged in Google users so people can vote down spammy links. Could be based on the frequency of the reports. Anything in first ten results with more than 100 negative votes per hour, automatically get removed and placed into a holding queue for a Google employee to review. If it's discovered to be spam, automatically penalize the URL in all results and remove it. Hosting companies will never want to host spammers, because all their good customers will go running to the hills. Just a thought..

Wiki for info

[HalAtWork]

The reason you're going to Wikipedia for actual information is because the site is structured to eliminate anything that isn't factual information. You're just realizing that the web is a bunch of crappy cross-linked blogs and syndicated content behind ads/paywalls. Soon you'll be hitting podcasts for editorial content instead of the ad-laden multi-click regurgitated PR between top 10 lists that make up most sites.