November 17, 2004

Less signal, more noise  

I've been getting some odd spam lately. Every couple days, a handful of new comments appears, linking only to Google. Sometimes (only sometimes) there are words or brief passages, but I haven't been able to discern any pattern among them, or among the affected entries. I've always understood the comment spam phenomenon to be about creating an abundance of links across the web to increase a product's Google page rank. But of course this can't be accomplished by linking to Google (unless of course you're Google -- but don't they kind of control their own destiny on this point?). So what's going on?

This reminds me of something I read on The Modulator the other day -- the new MSN Search was apparently showing Google as the #1 match for "more evil than satan." When word of their treachery got out, the folks at Microsoft quickly made some "automated relevance improvements" that changed the result. This seems like a pretty foolish opening salvo for Microsoft -- doesn't this kind of command-and-controlling just undermine MSN Search's authority? (Note that this is not analogous to Google bombing.)

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