totter - 6:25 am on Jun 8, 2005 (gmt 0)

Through all 6 million messages in this thread no one has been able to define a scraper site without using words and phrases like "Intent" or stuff like "I know one when I see one". I bet someone could replace the words scraper with porn and the entire thread would make perfect sense.

I would think that if you use words like "intent" or something like that it would require some sort of humnan judge to decide what is and isn't a scraper and as we all know that isn't googles way.

Since scaper sites do keep the ad prices for content sites cheap and attractive to potential and new advertisers, I don't think google will be in any rush to fix this problem any time soon, but if they did decide to fix the problem of scraper sites my guess they will do so in a couple of ways:

1. hand judge all sites -- very unlikely or
2. (feel free to argue this) Require that all adsense sites use a linking structure that a spider can follow and then use an algorithm to determine whether the outgoing links on any given page match what the page is about. If you have a certain number of links on a page that don't go with what the page is about than you can then be labled a scraper site.

My reasoning - If someone hand picks their outgoing links I would think the links on that page usually would follow a certain theme. If the links aren't hand picked then the words of the links will follow a certain theme, but the links may or may not follow a certain theme.