Microsoft seeks patent on link spam detection
Meanwhile, Google wants people to report suspicious links to them manually.
How about Microsoft as the sheriff of the wild, wild Internet? Though much of their legal efforts seem to go towards finding and reporting software pirates, Microsoft has involved itself in online fights with domain squatters and similar foes.
Though by their own admission the company watched Google pass them in search, Microsoft may be getting around to cleaning up a controversial aspect of search ranking.
The Huomah site listed a patent from Microsoft that looks like a substantial tool for detecting link spammers. From the abstract:
- A spam detection system collects link information for a web site at various times. The spam detection system extracts one or more features from the link information that relate to changes in the link information over time. The spam detection system then generates an indication of whether the web site is a spam web site using a classifier that has been trained to detect whether the extracted feature indicates that the web site is likely to be spam.
This is the sort of thing MarkMonitor told WebProNews about recently. Such a system would detect a site set up to do one thing, such as promoting travel, and when it switched to different content. Once those links change, Microsoft’s detector ought to be able to flag it as a spammy site.
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