Theory of mind time. Let's imagine we're Google.
What are we striving to accomplish?
Of course, in an ideal world, there would be ZERO spam.
But what if we could limit bad spam to say, 0.5% of searches.
Would that be pretty good?
From our perspective, we see spam constantly because many people in the IM industry do it, and know what it looks like. That said, put 10 of your IRL friends in front of search results and ask them to spot spam results, and they will probably be completely lost.
Those people make up the bulk of Google's users, not us. Which is why you can still spam Google and end users are none the wiser.
As you optimize, you actually start to get diminishing returns.
In other words, it's probably easier technically for Google to get from 20% spam to 10% than it is to get from 0.5% spam to 0.4% spam. Low hanging fruit, larger signatures for greater classes of bads etc.
Google doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be very good.
Sure stuff will slip through. Some of that may even be acceptable (in terms of optimization results) to Google.
It's probably not a good idea to develop a confirmation bias (Turkey problem) that slipping through is because we're smart. It can just as easily be because Google can't justify the effort and time to stop it.
After all, payday loan searches are a minute set of all searches performed daily.
What are we striving to accomplish?
Of course, in an ideal world, there would be ZERO spam.
But what if we could limit bad spam to say, 0.5% of searches.
Would that be pretty good?
From our perspective, we see spam constantly because many people in the IM industry do it, and know what it looks like. That said, put 10 of your IRL friends in front of search results and ask them to spot spam results, and they will probably be completely lost.
Those people make up the bulk of Google's users, not us. Which is why you can still spam Google and end users are none the wiser.
As you optimize, you actually start to get diminishing returns.
In other words, it's probably easier technically for Google to get from 20% spam to 10% than it is to get from 0.5% spam to 0.4% spam. Low hanging fruit, larger signatures for greater classes of bads etc.
Google doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be very good.
Sure stuff will slip through. Some of that may even be acceptable (in terms of optimization results) to Google.
It's probably not a good idea to develop a confirmation bias (Turkey problem) that slipping through is because we're smart. It can just as easily be because Google can't justify the effort and time to stop it.
After all, payday loan searches are a minute set of all searches performed daily.
