BeeDeeDubbleU - 7:26 am on Apr 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

For info, this is the link to the original "Combating Web Spam with Trustrank" report
[dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090...]

I believe that the significant thing is that Trustrank recognises that manual intervention is necessary. In their case this is to determine the seed sites, but it has been apparent for the last three or four years that manual intervention will eventually be required to clean up the results. It's now a question of when not if.

One thing I am not sure about is ...

While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages.

I have always believed that a small team from the each of the main SEs working full time on this could make a huge impact. If an instant lifetime ban was imposed on sites that were in blatant contravention of their guidelines the spammers would soon realise that this was too risky to be a good business model.