Monday, August 22, 2005
Word Lists and Spam Filtering - Google vs Yahoo
This is quite possibly one of the best reads I've had on the topic of search engine optimization and Google vs Yahoo. The story breaks down some highly used spam tactics and shows who's better and why [Yahoo or Google]. Additionally it provides some insight into who's already doing a good job of identifying some important issues with word lists and why / how they rank well."NCSA released a study that attempted to compare the respective merits of Google and Yahoo!'s search engines. (See My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours!). Unfortunately, the only thing it proved was which search engine was publishing the most gibberish it had collected - a fact apparently lost on the researchers. The three academics insisted that because Google was returning more gibberish, it must be doing a better job.
Doh!
...The trouble is that Google is returning pages which are nothing but great long lists of words as valid search results, when rarely, if ever, is this what the searcher is looking for....
...But strangely enough, some people do have a thing for strange combinations of words - and this week, it's these very hobbyists who have been able to shed more light on the search giants' internal operations than the academics. It's Google Whacking - the art of finding two words that produce just a single result from the search engine - which comedy writer Dave Gorman turned into a book and a stage show. You can see a list of the most recently discovered Google Whacks here. Current Whacks at the time of writing include " rhubarb underkill", "oxymoronically flakier", "overpaid brainworkers" - somewhat surprisingly - and, to our relief, there's only one web page in the world with the words "subhuman stepsiblings" close enough together to merit a hit."
Continue reading the full story over at TheRegister, they've got some great links and info in the full article.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 10:15 AM
Permanent Link: Word Lists and Spam Filtering - Google vs Yahoo
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