Thursday, April 8, 2010

Checking the Google Page Count of a Comment to Identify Spam

George R. in the forum had an interesting idea to catch spam: check how many results a phrase search for whatever the commenter posted are found in Google. If something yields a lot of hits in Google’s index, then it’s likely to be pasted in many places, thus – so the idea at least – spam. (For instance, a lot of spam is phrased in the unspecific style of “Interesting blog, thank you, I will look for more on this topic”... unfortunately, a couple of real comments may also be phrased this way, which is probably why spammers resort to this.)

Now, there might be some caveats to protect against – like a legitimate quote, which could be identified by its quote signs (though this wouldn’t catch unquoted proverbs being used), or very short comments – but otherwise this sounds like an interesting idea. What do you think?

[Thanks George!]

Checking the Google Page ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

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