Speaking Of Answers
Perhaps someone at the Techdirt Insight Community will have the ability to answer this one:
Does anyone have “reliable figures available that put Google’s splog problem into perspective.”
Matt Mullenweg pointed to it - “Why Google is the service of choice for sploggers.”
Quoting Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today (a darn good man) Michael Pollitt of The Guardian says: “Google, for better or worse, has its hand in every aspect of spam blogging. It finances them through AdSense, hosts them through Blogger and directs traffic to them via the search engine.”
There is, Bailey believes, some pain ahead for Google: “These sites do make Google money and are not going to be done away with without both spending money to stop them, and losing at least some business.”
Without figures from Google, how much pain there might be is frustratingly unknown. Other than Splogfighter’s monthly data, there are no reliable figures available that put Google’s splog problem into perspective. And that’s badly needed to help clear - or damn - the company’s name.
Anyone?
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7 opinions for Speaking Of Answers
Jonathan Bailey
Jul 17, 2007 at 12:25 pm
First off, thanks for the praise! I’m much obliged.
Needless to say, I’m just as interested in this as you so I’m going to be following this closely. Hopefully someone will be able to step up and give us some hard numbers.
I’ve been dying for them myself…
mark
Jul 17, 2007 at 6:52 pm
You deserve it Jonathan - we interacted long ago at another place and I found you helpful and informative. It isn’t forgotten.
It would be very interesting and with all these “whiz bangs” out there someone ought to have something reliable, I would think.
mikeho
Jul 18, 2007 at 2:29 am
Hmm. Interesting question. But what sort of answer would really be satisfying? Estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations are not sufficient. But if an anonymously submitted number appeared, would you believe it?
mark
Jul 18, 2007 at 4:56 am
No Mike, I doubt the community at large would accept an anonymously offered answer. It would have to have more substance than that.
I would think it should be provided by some “upper level” authority for it to be believable. There are folks like that at Techdirt, aren’t there? Of course, it doesn’t have to be Techdirt. Just be from an authority that would be known well enough.
Jonathan - any thoughts?
Jonathan Bailey
Jul 18, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Geez Mark, why don’t you give me all of the tough ones? lol…
That’s a tough call. I have a contact in Google I talk with regularly about this but Google has been very protective of hard stats.
If there were some reason to think an anonymous source were credible, I might be willing to consider the numbers but I doubt I’d run with them as fact. It might be useful for estimations though.
However, I’d have to be very skeptical of an anonymous source, but that’s just me.
Like I said, my answer is going to depend more on the verifiable credentials around the source, something hard to produce without a name…
mark
Jul 18, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Ha! You started it :)
Why does this name pop into my head instantly?
Danny Sullivan.
I just made the attempt to contact Danny at Search Engine Land. We’ll see if he can respond.
Jonathan Bailey
Jul 19, 2007 at 7:24 am
True… True… But that doesn’t mean you had to continue it.
Sounds good. I’d take an educated guess from a known source over a “fact” from an anonymous source any day…
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