> The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. That may be true, but I think one of the good points made on the OP is that it might actually be cultural constraints that keep them from solving the problem: twitter.com/paulg/status/14777613354128…: > You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (They must hate manual interventions; so inelegant). Google has some very smart and knowledgeable people, but the things they do have to fit into certain boxes, which means there are some problems they just can't fix, e.g. * Everything has to be automated at scale, which leads to consistent poor user experience (unappealable account closures initiated by inscrutable algorithms, SEO spam). * You get promoted by building new products, not maintaining existing ones, which leads to self-defeating churn outside of core areas (e.g. abandoning Google Talk and squandering their position in the messenger market). * etc.

PG did a tweet stream on Google's vulnerability and how a startup might attack it. twitter.com/paulg/status/14777605487879…

Today, I came across a Tweet from Paul related to this issue - twitter.com/paulg/status/14777605487879…. Looks like this is a growing problem.

twitter.com/mwseibel/status/14777078846… > I’m pretty sure the engineers responsible for Google Search aren’t happy about the quality of results either. I’m wondering if this isn’t really a tech problem but the influence of some suit responsible for quarterly ad revenue increases. Please no more of this. Two men, Page and Brin, together have basically unfettered control over Google.* If Google does something bad then, unless it's genuinely something small enough that those two could not be expected to hear about it, it's happening with—at the very least—their acquiescence. And low overall search quality is not something that some "suit" is successfully hiding from Good Czar Larry. They could fire the "suit", or command him or her to make other decisions. This is—again, at the very least—something that they have chosen not to do. The responsiblity lies with them. * There is the risk of lawsuits from the minority shareholders, I assume. But IIUC this is not realistically that big a restraint on what shareholders with a majority of votes can do. However IANAL.

The idea is not to develop a better search engine[0], but to no longer relegate product reviews to a search engine. Rather than an opaque algorithm as the trust factor, why not social (+n degree) trust? [0] twitter.com/paulg/status/14777605487879…