Google - an Akismet Almanac arms race

Normally when we predict things will happen its over months or years, not weeks - so when we predicted the inevitabiity of search spam filters early this year and also noted the things Google should to to get themselves back on track we noted that they should, as a matter of Class A Fundamentals:

Fundamentals - secure the next 3 years

1. Get the core search back to the quality it was a few years ago - this is the golden goose, the bread and butter, etc etc - if this drops away then everything else is moot. Sorry, Matt Cutts, if you believe your algorithms tell you it is better than ever before, then your algorithms are wrong. If I were looking to make Google search social, a good start would be letting people sharing spam-site killing data for filters. Crap search = fewer users, fewer users = fewer Ads seen, fewer Ads = less revenues, less revenues = misery.

2. Stop f*cking around with people's privacy. In the Silicon Valley bubble, privacy may be over - but to a lot of other people out there (and their governments) it isn't. To reduce the risk of being seen as creepy, evil guys that governments want to take a very close look at, rein in the this tendency. People can walk away very fast now decent competition is emerging (see above Ads - to - Misery tale), and grumpy Governments can tie up a lot of time, cost and ultimately market access.

Those are the big things, the "A" class "Must Do's".

3 weeks later and Lo, they announce the exact idea I highlighted above:

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

Kudos, though it is also more evidence that the will to act on spam has only really been there since a fairly strong user driven backlash since the New Year's superspamming of search results.

First thing to cull - Demand Media, and as we noted, HuffPo had to sell, we think they saw this coming. I hope we can also share our culls with friends, sort of like an Akismet Almanac

Personally I'm going to wait for Mozilla to do theirs because I don't like toolbars/apps that phone home to public corporations who are already playing fast and loose with user data. But net-net, this is a first move in a trend is going to create a major balance of power shift in the SEO spameconomy, because now:

(i) Users will be able to cull sites they know are cr*p, rather than waitfor Google et al to (not) act..

(ii) Those sites won't know if they are being culled or not for quite a while, so they are going to spend a lot of money being useless, poor things.

Cue arms race in frequency-hopping URLS.....

Now, lets see some movement on Item 2......