Spammed by Spam

To keep abreast of the latest happenings on the anti-spam front, I do a lot of research. I frequently search one of the major news sources for new articles involving spam.

By default, the service orders recent articles by relevance. The problem is that frequently highly relevant articles remain on the top, long after they are no longer timely. From day to day, I repeat the search, but get the same results. For traditional search results, that would be fine, but it doesn't really work for news.

The obvious solution is to resort the search results by date. This used to work. In the last few months, however, everyone has taken to including a notice similar to the following after each article:

"email the author via jim@nospammydomain.com, remove nospam, as its there online to dissuade the spam-bots"

So, the problem is now when I search for articles involving blocking spam, thousands of non-relevant articles appear. Some people use the term to mean any overwhelming amount of information that's not desirable. By that definition, these results would constitute spam.

The search provider could get around this kind of problem with a type of spam filter. It would detect that the content block is common across dozens of articles, and learn to ignore it. This kind of filter is common with major search providers, but apparently is not in use in this case.

The battle to provide relevant query results and identify spam email are in fact quite similar on many levels. Both require the use of advanced algorithms to remove irrelavent content, while preserving useful information.

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