Google Got a Very Broken SplogSpot

Remember when I'd gush about RSS feeds and how great they were because we'd be able to get just the content we wanted and it wouldn't have a bunch of spam and everything would be all rainbow Skittles and fluffy bunnies?

Never mind.

A bunch of my PubSub feeds that I use to monitor topics of interest have been taken over by entries from splogs. (Splogs = Spam Weblogs. Weblogs that are nothing but spam.) Most the ones I saw are from Blogspot, which I'm just renaming SplogSpot. The other ones were from fairly generic .info domains.

(Hey, there already is a real SplogSpot! It's a database of spam blogs that you can use as a filter! Niftee! http://splogspot.com/.)

I know when you offer a free resource like Google does in the case of Blogspot, you know that it's subject to some level of abuse. But this is just crazy. Searches that normally get three or four results over the course of week are generating 50 or 60 results in a day. Based on my tests, Feedster and Google Blog search are very impacted by it; Technorati less so and Yahoo, unsurprisingly, not at all. (Yahoo is pulling from such a small pool of blogs in the first place.)

At the moment you can get around it by appending -site:blogspot.com -site:info to your searches on those search engines that will allow it. Which unfortunately isn't all of them, but cleans up Feedster and Google Blog Search at least.

I am not looking forward to having to rework all my feeds to avoid BlogSpot's spew. I agree with Mark Cuban: "So please Google. Add a challenge system. Dump the flag you tried. It was a nice try, but doesnt get the job done. Its not an imposition to ask a blog poster to confirm their post with a link inside an email, or a word confirmation."

And while I'm mentioning Mark Cuban -- could we pullleeease have a site syntax for Icerocket? It would be so nice to kick out all the BlogSpot results with one simple addition to a query...

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