“Google”:http://www.google.com/ has done it again: solved a major problem on the web. Fixed Comment Spam! It was a blindingly obvious fix, but only with the usual 20/20 hindsight :-) It will take a little while to make a difference in the number of comment attacks, until all blogs are updated to take advantage of it. The major services out there (including LiveJournal for some of my readers) have it or are implementing it right away, in cooperation with Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Robert “brought it to my attention”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/01/18/no-more-spam/ from his blog and I checked out (as you should) this Google post called “Preventing comment spam“:http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html on Google’s official blog. All the gory (not really) details.
Very elegant, but it does require the major search engines, the reason for the comment spam problem, to implement ignoring the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links they index. Fortunately, that’s exactly what has happened, and why this is even news!
So, Google, thank you once times a “googol”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol&btnG=Google+Search!
Yay for Google!! (and double yay for getting rid of spam.)
Comment by Ruth — Wed, 2005-01-19 (Jan 19) @ 11:00
Since I’m having fun posting comments on your blog (and I’m probably going to get labled as a spammer), I thought I would say that the Google calculator is too cool. I didn’t know it could do that!
Comment by Ruth — Wed, 2005-01-19 (Jan 19) @ 11:13
That was secretly one of my reasons for posting that particular link to Google. They have a bunch of similar things…like phone book lookup and reverse phone number lookup. If you click the More link above their main search box I think you see some of it at least. Almost too much to pick from! And it didn’t call you a spammer yet it looks like :-) I’ve been catching about 30 per day though…
Comment by David — Wed, 2005-01-19 (Jan 19) @ 17:33