New Google Caffeine and spammers

I guess I don't have to explain what Google Caffeine is.

My concern is that every new tool is also a new tool that can be used by spammers. So, is is conceivable the some spammer boiler room, in some country where labor is cheap, just registers thousands of g-mail accounts and then start killing and promoting various search results?

It would seem that the user interference with Google results can be good and bad. Obviously, honest users will weed out all the bad stuff and thus bring relevant results up. But I'm sure that as we speak, spammers are already gearing up to do their own "search engine optimizations".

Any thoughts?

caffeine is a new achitecture, what exactly do you think is spam prone about a new backend?

My understanding is that users can promote certain search results and X the others. Also users can make comments.

The promoting and X-ing is only visible on the user profile, when the user is logged in, but I am sure it eventually affects search results if a lot of users promote or X certain sites.

Same thing with comments. Comments actually show up for the world to see, right away. I am sure that if a certain site gets 600 comments from 600 different users it will affect search results.

This is all good if users are just doing what users should do, but with this model I can already envision boiler rooms where spammers register numerous Google accounts and promote sites form different IP addresses.

Or perhaps I am just not understanding the architecture correctly. But as a general rule, whenever there is something new on the internet, the spammers and scumbags don't hesitate to jump on it.

Where did you read that people are going to be able vote on search results (ala digg I imagine) and that Google is going to thus rank sites that way?

You know, Google has experimented with that in the past, and always said it was for QC purposes only.

You say you're "sure", why are you sure?

I tried to write a couple of comments, for some search results, and before I clicked the button that completes the process, there was a message, form Google, saying something along the lines of, "Are you sure you want to publish your comment? It will be live and everyone will be able to see it."

Something along those lines, anyway.

I am just making a logical conclusion that if many people comment on a particular site that shows up in certain search results, it would be safe to assume that at some point it must affect the rank of that site, compared to other search results that have no comments. That's what I really meant when I said "I'm sure." It was more a figure of speech, and not meant as a statement of fact. I can see how my phrasing could be misinterpreted, as if I read it somewhere.

Do you think these comments would in any way affect search results?

Also, I still think that spammers are likely to bombard these search results with comments. Spammers bombard anything that goes, with just about anything. I can't really imagine that they would not have a go at these comments.

I don't think so. I quite frankly would be surprised if they did anything of the sort.

Well, people vote on search results every day in the form of SERP click tracking.

Google has made it a priority not getting upset by the bad votes some might cast upon the other sites, if this was true so all of the competitors could destroy each other sites using some poor quality links but we see such a thing has not happened, do not worry as Google will find some solutions always.

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Originally Posted by bermuda

...if this was true so all of the competitors could destroy each other sites using some poor quality links but we see such a thing has not happened...

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Well, if you think about it, how would we (i.e. regular internet users) know if it has or hasn't happened? If we search for something, we end up finding some sites, but how would we know if there is supposed to be a site in those search results that has been crushed by an unethical competitor.

Coincidentally, I recently just stumbled up on some site giving black hat SEO tips and this kind of crushing a competitor's site was one of the tips they were giving.

Google is if course very good, but I think it is inevitable that things slip through the crack, ever now and then.

I also think that the whole black hat issue will depend on the niche. If it's a cut throat niche, there will likely be some black hat boiler room techniques. But if it's not a very competitive niche no one will bother.

The whole "comments" thing is always questionable.

Statistics show that more consumers trust recommendations over ads. OK, that makes sense. But what doesn't is that consumers are duped into falling for recommendations of total strangers on the internet. So, advertising specialists are well aware of those facts. So, what do they do? They change the advertising format into "recommendations" as opposed to plain ads. What this means is that they go on forums, or wherever consumers can post recommendations, and pose as innocent users doing just that.

I am sure that with Google enabling comments, there will be a lot of "recommendations" on certain search terms. So, at the end, what is the point of this new feature? I hardly see a point, since it is not likely to legitimize the search.

Just my 2 cents.