Thoughts on Web Spam

Guy just wrote:

Just occurs to me that Google, with all its insistence about how pure its search is, really is making quite a lot of money off of people who pollute the web with spam blogs and fake reviews and such. In a way, what they are doing is worse than simply having unpure search. They are actually helping to reconstitute the web as a whole as a big network of spam. Know what I mean, Vern? Nothing personal vis a vis you and your projects by the way. Just an observation.

To which I responded:

No, I agree. Example scenerio: A person does a search on Google.
They click on one of the ads. Google makes money. They don’t like
the page they went to, so they go back to the search page. They end
up clicking to a spam page. On that page they click on an ad. Google
makes money. Turns out that the page they clicked to also has google
ads on it. Clickity click click – money all over the place is being
made thanks to diluted usefulness in web-based information.

On a related note, I was wondering how good Google’s search would be
if there were no such thing as spam. Used to be that Google would
rank a page high the more links pointed to that page. Once people
figured that out and started making link-farms, Google had to tweak
their algorithms so that such spammy things wouldn’t be allowed. BAM!
When that tweaking happened, the ranking got worse.

Imagine the kind of productivity this world would have without spam.