From John Markoff, The New York Times:
Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.
A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators. The report is available at www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf
Fake Web pages are seriously "gaming" the online advertising market, and polluting the Internet. We've known this for a while. What's particularly disturbing is the role that advertisers are playing here.
“Ultimately, it is advertisers’ money that is funding the search-spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users’ productivity,” [the researchers] write in the paper, which will be presented in May at the International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta.
[Yi-Min] Wang, group manager and senior researcher for cybersecurity and systems management at Microsoft, said, “The good guys are part of the problem.”
"Tens of thousands of junk Web pages" is not really accurate.We are talking about Millions of Millions of junk web pages, most generated totally automatically with programs like Traffic Hurricane.Their only purpose is to bomb the Search Engines and achieve a higher pagerank. In conclusion, Yes, Junk WEB is strangling the web.
Posted by: Demmy | January 09, 2008 at 04:08 AM
We have similar reports in our site:
http://spoudastes.blogspot.com/
Thank you
Kostas Ioannou
Posted by: Kostas | January 22, 2008 at 01:37 PM
We have similar reports in our site:
http://spoudastes.blogspot.com/
Thank you
Kostas Ioannou
Posted by: Kostas | January 22, 2008 at 01:38 PM