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Google's pointers on countering Web spam
news.com — Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team and an engineer who's been working on the problem for eight years, offered some tips about combating it during a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo here.
putergirl- 355 diggs
- digg it
- spacecheese, on 04/29/2008, -10/+2sit on mah face putergirl
- ThirdPrize, on 04/29/2008, -13/+2First Post!
- jrizzo, on 04/29/2008, -1/+1uh...2 comes after 1...and your don't get third prize for first or second...
- oreo2123, on 04/29/2008, -0/+1you get: last place (or third prize - you're choice).
in a world full of idiotic forum posts - this one ranks up there on the stupidity scale...then add the fact that you didn't even get first post and BAM it's a whole new level of moron.
...my bad for ranting but it's early and the coffee maker at work isnt working. - ninjagore, on 04/29/2008, -0/+0In all likelihood, spacecheese and ThirdPrize were writing their comment simultaneously. Spacecheese just happened to hit "Submit" first.
- vmanthegreat, on 04/29/2008, -6/+1what's your beef with spam? i like it.
- Grooblle, on 04/29/2008, -1/+1I prefer HAM before SPAM every day of the week
- crush, on 04/29/2008, -5/+1nothing earth shattering. use captcha on comments. ok. we knew that, didnt we. i am using one to type my comment. lol
- widgetmaker, on 04/29/2008, -0/+1Digg has captcha?
- KipEvil, on 04/29/2008, -2/+11Here is the spoiler
Use CAPTCHA- tj111, on 04/29/2008, -2/+1Thanks, saved me a read.
- Schmich, on 04/29/2008, -3/+4So is this the result of his 8 year research or? =/
- ragley, on 04/29/2008, -5/+2if google wanted to reduce spam, they would add the function to gmail that would allow users to block an address instead of just filtering them to the spam box.
- Obelia, on 04/29/2008, -1/+4It's about webspam, not email spam.
- Obelia, on 04/29/2008, -0/+2It's a very basic article, aimed at people who have no clue. He's wrong about CAPTCHA, though: although you should use one, KittenAuth and simple maths questions are not the best ways of going about it. You need something accessible to blind people so images are out, and maths questions are too easy for bots to adapt to.
- cplusplus, on 04/29/2008, -0/+4Seems like they're keeping the good tricks to themselves.
- louiebaur, on 04/29/2008, -0/+2KittenAuth is frustrating to me you cant tell whats cats, dogs mice or whatever animals they have in there
- Ladadadada, on 04/29/2008, -0/+8Captcha is fundamentally broken. Not just broken as in "It's too easy" but broken as in "No matter how we redesign Captcha they will still be able to solve it". Part of the trouble is that you can always hire humans to do the work instead of bots.
What we need to do is change the economics of SPAM so that it is no longer profitable. This can be done by altering risk to benefit ratios (get better at finding the spammers and prosecuting them) or by altering the cost to benefit ratios (make it more difficult to get the spam in front of the idiots and make it more difficult for the idiots to buy products from spam).
Captcha is such a small part of the whole spam environment that improving it by 50% would still not reduce the total amount of spam by any significant amount.
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