hutcheson - 2:59 am on Feb 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

Oh, this is a self-correcting problem. As soon as the affiliate spammers see enough interest in Microsoft search to focus on it -- and it's from all accounts much easier to manipulate artificially -- then those results will tank (even further than now, and yes, it is possible.)

It is and will probably forevermore be futile to search for <a spammy phrase> at any search engine. You'll get tens of thousands of affiliate doorways for every single site for a real <widget>. That situation won't change: because it's a distributed denial-of-service attack (kind of like a zillion ants looking for holes in a screen door) no fixed or automatic defenses will last long. And the same thing is probably true for almost any common search term (with diminishing probability almost perfectly linear against frequency of search) -- because there are tools that allow spammers to pick any search terms for which it's not yet true.

[edited by: ciml at 4:12 pm (utc) on Feb. 12, 2005]