Earlier this month, slashtag search engine Blekko made some waves by manually removing websites from its search portal when users identified them as spam. Now, the company has taken another step in its battle against low-quality sites with its recent announcement of new AdSpam technology.
The new technology has already helped Blekko identify 1.1 million domains as spam, and these domains have been blocked from Blekko's search engine result pages accordingly. The AdSpam algorithm will assess every web page before it can become a result for a user query.
In the company blog, Blekko explains that the AdSpam technology examines pages for specific signals, including multiple display ads and thin content, to determine which pages are unsuitable for its selective searchers. CEO Rich Skrenta assures users that Blekko's human-powered curation efforts will not end in light of the new algorithm. Rather, the technology will enhance human-generated filters.
“With this update, we're reaching much further down the long tail of spam to improve the quality of our index,” Skrenta said. “We're combining algorithms with community to improve the future of web search.”
Although Blekko isn’t a household name and this update will have far less of an impact on sites than Google’s recent algorithmic update, marketers should take note of this shift as part of the growing online culture rewarding quality site content.
Plus, Blekko may one day become a bigger player in the search market. As Brafton reported, it handled more than 1 million queries per day just a week after its initial release.
