Would you be surprised to know that some people who work in the search engine industry know who is responsible for a lot of comment spam ... I met some of them recently. And some of them even have blogs of their own. Seriously. I haven't written much about this yet, but with the recent problems that have been exposed in MovableType (see: More on Comment Spamming, and "If I chase the spammers out of my yard and onto the neighbors, it's only a matter of time until they come back. No, we all need to disincentivize these fuckers now." He's right. And there's and 80/20 solution that ought to go a long way toward solving this problem. We know that spam works because of web page ranking algorithms based on link counting (PageRank, WebRank, whatever). But as humans, we can clearly distinguish between content posted by a blog's owner and that posted by random, anonymous, and possibly malicious users (or spambots). Search engines today seem not to, but there's a reasonable argument that it's worth putting some effort into. If you assume the following:
- 80% of blogs are hosted by or produced on one of the more popular blogging platforms
- 80% of people don't significantly tweak the default templates available in their blogging software
- those people are the least likely to be actively fighting spam and, as a result, have more spam than the 20% of blogs where the owner is more defensive Then a partial solution is fairly clear. I've heard and seen others discuss it over the past few months. The search engines needs to be smarter about reading and indexing content. When folks like Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog
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