Spam Clock Claims 1 Million Spam Pages Are Created Every Hour

Google's high-quality search results have been hit hard lately as spammers have been increasingly successful in gaming the system to serve you useless pages that contain only a nugget of relevancy to your query and are slathered in ads. To illustrate this growing problem, the founders of startup search engine Blekko created the Spam Clock, which claims that more than 220 million spam pages have been created since January 1st. (Skrenta told adotas that the numbers are based on the growth of spam, not actual spam page tracking.) Blekko founder Rick Skrenta writes on his blog that there will soon be a tipping point, in which there's more junk on the Web than useful information. To back up his argument, Skrenta points to an estimate from Microsoft that spam comprises 90-percent of the e-mail sent via its Hotmail service.

Could spam pages reach a similar point? There's a working economic model already in place; spammers pay people anywhere from $.05 to $1 to create a junk page, which, after being indexed, brings ad revenue each time somebody clicks on it. The problem is that there are so many new pages created each day that Google, Bing and other companies are having a tough time sorting and properly indexing the sites according to their relevancy.

Spam Clock Claims 1 Million Spam Pages Are Created Every Hour originally appeared on Switched on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.switched.com/2011/01/10/blekko-spam-clock-1-million-pages-an-hour/

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