More signs of discriminating when building a blog search index.
“Instead of crawling, Ask Blog & Feed Search harnesses the subscription data of hundreds of thousands of real people who use Bloglines, the #1 online feed reader, to create our search index. In the absence of a mature link structure, people provide the best way to discover the freshest, highest quality feeds — information that isn’t exposed to crawlers. In addition, this “collective human intelligence” provides a natural defense against spam, as people typically do not subscribe to low quality content.”
Via MacManus
Using people’s subscriptions is a great way to build a whitelist and keep it current. But I would expect the spammers will find a way around this pretty quickly. I hope for Ask’s sake that it won’t be as easy as simply creating a bunch of bloglines accounts that subscribe to the spammers’ feeds. Ask will need to evaluate the actual usage of bloglines accounts and only add feeds from those accounts that exhibit “typical blog reader user behavior”. Whatever that is.
*nods*
With Fletcher coming out and saying, “The challenge is to create world-class blog search, which we don’t think exists now.”
If this is more than PR fodder they should have thought about this already and have something in place.