poto

this isn't really news, but an interesting read...

I'll dig up the original pdf and post it shortly in case anybody wants to read the full version...

---

blog-hosting site blogspot.com had an-order-of-magnitude higher
spam appearances in top search results than other hosting domains
in both benchmarks, and was responsible for about one in every
four spam appearances (22% and 29% in the two benchmarks
respectively, to be exact). In addition, at least three in every four
unique blogspot URLs that appeared in top-50 results for
commercial queries were spam (77% and 75%). We also showed
that over 60% of unique .info URLs in our search results were
spam, which was an-order-of-magnitude higher than the spam
percentage number for .com URLs.

For Layer #2 – redirection domains, we showed that the
spammer domain topsearch10.com was behind over 1,000 spam
appearances in both benchmarks, and the
209.8.25.150~209.8.25.159 IP block where it resided hosted
multiple major redirection domains that collectively were
responsible for 22-25% of all spam appearances. We also
observed that the majority of the top redirection domains were
syndication-based, serving text-based ads-portal pages.

For Layer #3 – aggregators, we presented the surprising finding
that two IP blocks 66.230.128.0~66.230.191.255 and
64.111.192.0~64.111.223.255 appeared to be responsible for
funneling an overwhelmingly large percentage of spam-ads clickthrough
traffic. In our study, we easily collected over 100,000
spam ads that were associated with these two IP blocks, including
many ads served by non-redirection spammers as well. These two
IP blocks occupy the “bottleneck” of the spam double-funnel and
may prove to be the best layer for attacking the search spam
problem.

For Layer #4 – syndicators, we discovered that a handful of ads
syndicators appeared to serve as the middlemen for connecting
advertisers with the majority of the spammers. In particular, the
top-3 syndicators were involved in 59-68% of the spam-ads clickthrough
redirection chains that we sampled. By serving ads on a
large number of low-quality spam pages at potentially lower
prices, these syndicators could become major competitors to
main-stream advertising companies who serve some of the same
advertisers’ ads on search-result pages and other high-quality,
non-spam pages.

For Layer #5 – advertisers, we showed that even well-known
websites’ ads had significance presence on spam pages.
Ultimately, it is advertisers’ money that is funding the search
spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the web with lowquality
content and reducing web users’ productivity. By
exposing the end-to-end search spamming activities, we hope to
educate users not to click spam links and spam ads, and to
encourage advertisers to scrutinize those syndicators and traffic
affiliates who are profiting from spam traffic at the expense of the
long-term health of the web.