MALE SPEAKER: Today, we have a fun webmaster question
from Barry Schwartz in New York.
Barry asks, was there a key moment in your spam fighting
career where you made a mistake that you
regretted related to spam?
So he's not just talking about choice of wardrobe or anything
like that.
I can think of at least two mistakes
that I've made related to spam.
So I'll tell you about both.
I remember talking to a very well known SEO at a search
conference in San Jose probably seven years ago, give or take.
And that SEO said, you know what?
Paid links are just too prevalent.
They're too common.
There's no way that you guys would
be able to crack down on them and enforce that, and come up
with good algorithms, or take manual action to sort of put
the genie back in the bottle, as he put it.
And that was when I realized that I'd made a mistake,
and that we had allowed paid links that
passed page rank to go a little bit too far
and become a little bit too common on the web.
And so in the early days of 2005, 2006,
you'd see Google cracking down a lot more aggressively
and taking a pretty hard line on our rhetoric about paid links
that past page rank.
At this point, most people know that Google disapproves of it.
It probably violates, like, the Federal Trade Commission's
guidelines, all those sorts of things.
We have algorithms to target it.
We take spam reports about it.
And so for the most part, people realize it's not a good idea.
And if they do that, they might face the consequences.
And so for the most part, people try
to steer clear of paid links that
pass page rank at this point.
But we probably waited too long before we
started to take a strong stand on that particular issue.
Another mistake that I remember is
there was a group of content farms.
And we were getting some internal complaints where
people said, look, this website, or that website, is really bad.
It's just poor quality stuff.
I don't know whether you call it spam, or low quality.
But it's a really horrible user experience.
And I had been to one particular page on one of these sites
because at one point my toilet was running.
And I was like, OK, how do you diagnose
a toilet that was running.
And I had gotten a good answer from that particular page.
And I think I might have over generalized a little bit,
and been like, no, no, there's lots of great quality
content on some of these sites because, look, here was
this one page that helped solve the diagnostic of why
does your toilet run?
And how do you fix it, and all that sort of stuff?
And the mistake that I made was judging from that one anecdote
and not doing larger scale samples,
or listening to the feedback, or looking
at more pages on the site.
And so I think it took us a little bit longer to realize
that some of these lower quality sites, or content farms,
or whatever you want to call them,
were sort of mass creating pages rather than really solving
users' needs with fantastic content.
And so I think, as a result, we did wake up to that.
And we started working on it months before it really
became wide scale in terms of complaints.
But we probably could have been working on it even earlier.
Regardless, we're always looking for good feedback.
We're always looking for, what are we missing?
What we need to do to make our web results better quality?
And so any time we roll something out,
there's always the question of, could you
have thought of some way to stop that, or to take better action,
or a more clever algorithm?
And could you have done that sooner?
And so I feel like Google does a lot of great work.
And that's very rewarding.
And we feel like, OK, we have fulfilled our working
hours with meaningful work.
And yet, at the same time, you always wonder,
could you be doing something better?
Could you find a cleaner way to do it, a more elegant way
to do it, something with higher precision, higher recall?
And that's OK.
It's healthy for us to be asking ourselves that.
So great question, those are a couple key moments
I can remember where it felt like we made a mistake by not
paying attention to a particular topics soon enough.
Hope that helps.