Google To Blame For Spam?

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

The finding is striking because it hints at the possibility of curbing the practice.

The researchers uncovered a complex scheme in which a small group, creating false doorway pages, works with operators of Web-based computers who profit by redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.

“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”

Using questionable or illegal techniques to improve the ranking of a Web site in query results is known as search-engine spamming. The practice has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients’ Web traffic — a field known as search-engine optimization — from undermining their page-ranking systems.

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.

Search-engine spam is a small but growing component of the overall spam problem, which is predominantly junk e-mail sent from millions of Internet-connected home PCs that have been infected with malicious software. The overall amount of e-mail spam has more than doubled in the last year, according to Postini, a communications security firm.

Mr. Sifry said search-engine spam might be more controllable because of the improved accountability of the Web. “I am actually optimistic about squashing all of this, or at least making sure that it is manageable,” he said.

The Microsoft paper was distributed by Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma, cybersecurity investigators in the company’s research division, in collaboration with Yuan Niu and Hao Chen, computer scientists at the University of California, Davis...read more

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