Microsoft Research Automates Hunt for Search Engine Spam

[slaughterbeck]

By Ryan Naraine

Researchers at Microsoft are working on an ambitious new project to hunt down and neutralize large-scale search engine spammers.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant's Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group has taken the wraps off Strider Search Defender, an experimental project that automates the discovery of search spammers through non-content analysis.

The project integrates technology from two previous Microsoft Research prototypes—Strider HoneyMonkey and Strider URL Tracer—and promises a new approach to removing junk results from search engine queries.

"The Web is so badly spammed, you can find a spam site on just about every search query," said Yi-Min Wang, the researcher heading up the project at Microsoft, in an interview with eWEEK. "We think this approach can pinpoint the big spammers and use their own tactic against them."

According to data from Automattic Kismet, a tool that helps bloggers thwart comment spammers, a whopping 93 percent of all blog comments are spam. With Strider Search Defender, Wang's team is taking a context-based approach that uses URL-redirection analysis to pinpoint spammers.

"For the spammers to be successful, they have to post millions of fake comments on message boards and blogs. That's the only way to get picked up by search engines. If we can find a way to pinpoint them before they get indexed by search engines, the problem is solved," Wang said.

Source: PCMag.com

I for one feel online “Fake Content Spam” has reached epidemic levels.



Best wishes,
Kimmy

 

[kroniczero]

nice article

 

[RickM]

Yes, good read - i bet they wont be asking Google to be part of their Anti-Spam project :p