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I'm talking about when you actually use the engine for research on something you're interested in that may also coincide with a lot of search spammers' business interests.
On a certain four-word query I typed in today almost the whole first page of search results was dominated by various sites using keyword spam and redirects to redirect my query to the same sports betting site.
I know the standard Google response may be that we should report such abuse, but when ten sites on a subject are all using redirects to the same online casino, should they even make it into the index at all? Is relevance starting to suffer because Google is trying to confuse optimizers, while letting older forms of spam re-enter the fray?
How come Google cannot automatically detect sites which are just one page of keyword stuffing combined with a redirect? Is this sort of thing not just old hat for the major SE's?
And a final thought: is the fact that SE's so often lose the battle to spam actually an argument in favor of a paid inclusion model or a more vigilant editorial model like LookSmart's?
And on the same note: will the difficulty of finding reliable info on some topics quickly mean that search engine users will start to turn to trusted vertical portals, just navigating directly to these first and using their internal search function, rather than using the perpetually unstable general interest search engines, which seem bent on playing different games every month to keep spammers at bay, monetize the search traffic, etc. etc.,?
Indeed, will *bookmarks* make a comeback?
:D
