Why search engine don't really want to remove all the spam from their results

We live in an era that is so much based on information that it seems there is no way the society will eventually reduce it's production of « information » would it be completely worthless or not. The internet in it's actual form has become a completely unmanaged blurb of « equal » information without any good way to actually classify and organize the contents of that blurb, on a "quality" basis, not on the supposed "meaning" of the page.

Also, let's not forget that not only do we have an incredible amount of information available online already, but thatt spammers are working 24/7 to publish more and more sites that copy, steal and remix actual information just in the (realistic it seems) hopes of making a quick money out of easy to grab internet traffic.

This means, that not only now internet users have to actually search and filter themselves the information (because of the incredible amount of "noise" on the web available to them, but they also have to constantly try to avoid spammy web pages that are only online to lure them into clicking on paid links. (It's no wonder that people that actually work and consume information on the internet often use several tools that allow them to actually browse the internet by other means that simple "search" since search is less and less reliable, leaving the place to "trust based" systems.)

Since normal people are not using those advanced tools and still using search engines to get information, they are often times overwhelmed with the amount of links especially if we consider spam and made for adsense pages.

Sure, people are clicking on the paid links, but why? I think people click so much because they are unable to actually find good information on their first click. It's true that most of the time people have access to the right information after they clicked on an ad, but why that extra step? Why do we have to deal with the double or the triple of the necessary information? Because companies are making a lot of money from allowing spammers to actually stay in the search engines. We talking about a whole economy here were "content publishers" reuse information and get good rankings on search engines, simply by re-using and republishing existing content, or slight changes to it.

To us this is a big issue with the current search engine model, since the search engines have interest in keeping those sites in their indexes since those sites will generally clicks, thus revenue!

Isin't it paradoxal that a search engine can't exclude "thin" spam pages from it's index cause it generates too much money? Isn't there a conflict of interest there?

The way faveeo.com would like to manage this problem, is to allow users to exclude certain sites, certain "types" of sites and also certain keyworks, to simply block content from even getting to them.

This, and the user to user trust features of faveeo.com would make it very difficult for users to easily get their page in front of millions of readers.

What do you think, do you see a conflict of interest about the search engines spam fighting policy? What do you think would be the best idea to solve this conflict of interest?

In general, I love your

In general, I love your concept guys, it's great to see people (re)thinking our everyday use of the mighty web, but...

First of all, please define "quality". Is there really any definition of 'quality' valid and applicable for the most of the usecases you're trying to solve? Honestly, I doubt that.

Second of all: On the one hand, you state first: "...now internet users have to actually search and filter themselves the information..." Right, true. On the other hand you state your considered solution for this problem: "...faveeo.com would like to manage this problem by allowing users to exclude certain sites, certain "types" of sites and also certain keywords..."

So, it appears to me, you consider to solve the problem of the way too complicated and time-consuming information (web) search by remanaging the same necessary actions on another platform? Well, where's the difference then?

PS: Not Anonymous, posted by http://twitter.com/bit2bit ;)

Hey there, thanks for your

Hey there, thanks for your comment, I did not see your reply up until a couple of days ago, being too busy on some other paid work! I'm now back nearly full time on faveeo work, so I can take some time to answer your questions.

"First of all, please define "quality". Is there really any definition of 'quality' valid and applicable for the most of the usecases you're trying to solve? Honestly, I doubt that."

Your question is interesting, as it implies that faveeo.com is a system that wants to determine what is quality content. The interesting concept with faveeo.com is that precisely it does not try to determine what is quality content, it only tries to determine what is quality content, user per user.

Since quality is so subjective, we don't believe any algo can actually provide results that will be "quality" for all users, our approach is based on behavioral analyses and focus on trying to find what each user likes and dislikes based on his actual interaction with the content, and his relations with other users and their interactions with the same content. The objective "quality" concept is totally replaced by a subjective "relative quality" that will vary fron one user to another.

So faveeo.com will not try to guess what is quality content, it will instead recommend content that people that you respect and trust have liked. The crucial thing here, is that faveeo will not require users to actually become "friends" with one another and will not simply allow to follow their friends from other networks, but it will instead automatically try to create a "trust network" between all the users of the whole faveeo.com network!

"So, it appears to me, you consider to solve the problem of the way too complicated and time-consuming information (web) search by remanaging the same necessary actions on another platform? Well, where's the difference then?"

faveeo's system is more about behavioral and social recommendations than about user-centered filtering, so I would say that I don't think we recreate the same filtering systems than other search engines, since in theory faveeo.com does not require user intervention, except of course, clicking on results they are interested in!

Hope this is a bit more clear!

Alexis

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