Negative externalities of Google
Google is on the whole an enormous and wonderful public good.
However, it has at least one bad side effect: it's strongly encouraging spammers to try anything to get well-respected sites to link to their viagra web sites. Therefore: blog comment spam, referer spam, wiki spam, ...
Prior to Google, those links would only help criminals if people clicked on them, which requires a certain amount of thought to make them look relevant. Because googlebot is not quite so clever yet, even stupid links can get some marginal gain for spammers.
I can imagine an optimal algorithm might disregard those links. But until spammers really believed that the links weren't helping, we'd still see lots of web spam.
posted Fri 3 Sep 2004 in /business/google | link
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