msndude - 11:43 pm on Jul 13, 2006 (gmt 0)

Remember how about a month ago many queries produced nothing but "splog" results? I was kind of disappointed that no one noticed that most of them went away fairly suddenly. Following my rule that "I won't talk about if you don't notice it" was very frustrating this time!

Now you also know why I've been persistently asking if anyone thought their site had been wrongly blacklisted, and why I've been checking those out personally. I'm happy to report, by the way, that all the mistakes I found during this period were generated by the old system; so far I haven't seen a single false positive from the new system -- at least, not affecting anyone on Webmaster World.

Finally, it's certainly true that someone could do this to try to blacklist a competitor (or even the New York Times), but, as you say, we have a plan for that too -- a bit more sophisticated than "give big sites a free pass." :-)