Was Bill Gates right when he said that spam would be eradicated in the near future?
I hadn’t thought about this in a while, which I guess is a big part of the answer. Blogs, social networks, search engines, and social content sites where I used to be bombarded by spam now seem relatively clean.
This is anecdotal of course, but a quick check of Google Zeitgeist seems to back me up. Over the last four years, there has been a 60+% decrease in the number of searches for the “spam” on Google. If this number is even somewhat correlated to the actual prevalence of spam (and therefore need to look for solutions to it), there certainly seems to have been a significant decline.
Spamming itself, though, has not stopped. These two Squawk blogs get tons of spam comments coming into the queue, and my spam folder can catch hundreds of messages on a given day.
The difference now, of course, is that there are better filtering tools. For bloggers, Akismet and others have help keeping spam out of viewable comments. On Squawk, we simply review comments before they go live, which seems to be a disincentive enough for spammers to not overload us. Sites like Facebook and Digg largely solved the spam problem simply by creating a barrier to signup (email activation + captcha) and then vigilantly deleting accounts used for spam. I’m guessing Google combines a similar human diligence, with some automated anti-spam content filtering and page rank magic to keep the problem in check on its various search indexes.
Overall, the procedures and tools we as a community have developed seem to have created a high enough barrier to make spam ineffective in mainstream sources. In other words, like a growing and evolving society, has the Internet matured from a wildwest, to a society of some law and order?
Feedback? Write a comment, or e-mail the author at lee(AT)squawkingtech.com
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