"pure spam"

[lucy24]

A "how-to" question after following assorted links at Google and coming up cold:

Is there any place ordinary humans can go to report pure-spam sites?

Background: As part of making ebooks, I often have to do exact-text searches (looking for sources of unattributed quotes, that kind of thing). Currently I'm working on a fairly well-known text. Up to half of my search results turn out to be obvious spam sites-- the ones where they've just pasted in random strings of text from some public domain source. The sitename and/or page title makes it obvious they're not an ebook site. But I'm ### if I can find any place to turn in the suckers.

Sure, there's a Send Feedback box. But, sheesh, they must receive millions of these every day, and there's not even a Category box. Does anyone actually look at this stuff?

[not2easy]

I seldom use Google any more due to their automated geo-redirecting of searches, but they always had a place on the search results pages to report junk results. A quick search on ixquick (or StartPage as they prefer to be called) turns up: [support.google.com...]
They claim it sets off a manual review.

[lucy24]

Thanks, not2easy. Not sure I care for their implication that I actually have to visit the offending page-- I mean, if my search string was from a 19th-century book about pigs, and the result is a page called Cheap Auto Insurance on a domain called meaningless-gibberish dot biz, I'm pretty confident of that Pure Spam diagnosis ;) But, well, whatever.

[keyplyr]

Wikipedia has an informative page about The Spamhaus Project including a few "report spam sites" links.

[martinibuster]

The link to a "send feedback" form at the bottom of the SERP is good enough for me. It's so small, I don't imagine it gets tremendous amount of use.

[lucy24]

If you use the form that not2easy cited above, each individual report elicits an immediate email saying that your report has gone through. And you also -- even though it's done within wmt/gsc where you already had to log in -- get to do one of those pictorial captchas. The kind where, for instance, you have to identify all pictures containing "a boat", and one of the pictures is a vast body of water shading into invisibility with who-knows-what lurking in the distance, or "a river", and half the pictures are unidentifiable bodies of water, or "a storefront", and one picture is a bricked-in opening ... and so on. This happens every time, so someone must be doing it on purpose. At least so far I haven't been asked to distinguish between a rat and a mouse; I always get at least one of those wrong.