Microsoft vows to fight evil on several fronts

Microsoft has its share of people that dislike them - but that apparently means nothing to them. They have decided to use their powers to fight all that is evil and profitable in today's cruel world.

Their most recent target is "web spam".
Web spam being defined as those web pages that you get when you type into Google some search phrase and then the top link available, when clicked, is actually just some junk page full of pop-ups, redirects, and ads.

Microsoft wants to add this new superpower to its search engines and therefore prevent users from this daily annoyance and instead only see ads on Microsoft search engines which generate them revenue and not anyone else.

How do they do it? The article goes into incredible depth and says:

Fighting spam is a priority at Microsoft. While most of the emphasis has been on spam in e-mail, Microsoft's researchers this week showed an application of statistical analysis to identify what Microsoft calls Web spam.

Ahhh. Statistics. It all makes sense now.

To be fair, the article does then go on to describe essentially exactly what Google does for its page rank systems and implies that Microsoft will be doing its usual "embrace and extend" in order to try to muscle into the market.

Since Google still has the problem and Microsoft seems to be supremely good at screwing up whatever they get into until the 3rd of 4th try - I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.

Posted by Eric at June 10, 2004 02:50 PM | TrackBack