Search Engine SPAM - The Plot Thickens

Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Rip-Off . / . Search Engine Spam . / . The Story . / . Next. / . The Plot Thickens

Search Engine Spam, continued...

The days and then weeks pass.

It was time to share the issue with the 10,000 monthly visitors to our web site. On November 1, we posted information about the spam and suggested a temporary workaround for search engine users. <http://www.acecam.com/reviews.html> I notified AltaVista directing them to the web page which discusses the issue and their failure to act.

AltaVista responds with the same canned response as before. "We are working on better ways of detecting and protecting against spamming of the index. We will implement them as soon as possible....." November 4, 1997

At this point, I became aware LocalEyes now also dominated the search for "camera stores" on Excite. There's a certain irony in Excite's search engine when it asks the user if he wants "more like this?"

I send Brian Reid another letter expressing my exasperation at receiving the same canned response each time I and others write AltaVista Support. He responds at length:

"The address with which you are communicating really does reach a person. It's the same one I talk to. And they really are working on it.

The problem is that there are 100 million entries in the AltaVista database and it is not even remotely possible to deal with spam by manually removing things. 100 million database entries take about 500 disks, each of which is 9 gigabytes.

"I don't know if you've ever dealt with a 9 gigabyte disk, but simply erasing one--writing a zero over top of every piece of data stored on the disk--takes about 2 hours. If you have to look at the data first, read it and then write it, then it takes 4 or 5 hours. Going in by hand to remove one entry from the index, as we would have to do for example if a federal judge issued an injunction, takes about 5 hours.

"The only solution is to modify the crawler so that it doesn't include the spam in the first place, and to let the existing spam expire. These particular spammers are quite vexing, and the guys are working hard on software modifications to keep them from being able to do this, but it's not something that we can do instantly. I assure you that nobody hates index spammers worse than the programmers who do web crawling. They are absolutely the enemy." - Brian Reid, AltaVista 11/10/97

I asked Brian Reid to clarify exactly what he means by letting "the existing spam expire." He hasn't answered yet, leading me to suspect the spam is there to stay until LocalEyes removes the pages.

Now there's an idea! LocalEyes could undo this public relations nightmare by simply removing most of the documents from AltaVista's and Excite's search engine. Be like everyone else, including Yahoo who has a link or two appear most times when I do a search for camera stores and other businesses.

Excite and LookSmart have never acknowledged the email I sent them. Excite did respond to a colleague, "Hi There, Thanks for letting us know. We'll look into it, and see what can be done. Thanks so much for using Excite!" - Jon L. Hance, Product Support Engineer, 11/13/97

Where it stands now...

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