Monday 28 December 2009

We now resume our regularly scheduled service

Apologies for the interruption of service. Google's anti-spam bots decided that this blog was spam.

Google's bots can of course have type I and type II error; if they're on the frontier, they can only trade off killing real blogs against failing to kill spam blogs. I would have thought, though, that an efficient algorithm would weigh at least somewhat a site's Google PageRank. Offsetting is PR6: one below the University of Canterbury's main site (PR7). If a spam blog can get to 6, then something's wrong with PageRank.

We now resume our regularly scheduled service. I hope to pass my future Turing tests.

2 comments:

  1. PageRank is only one of many quality signals that Google uses for ranking nowadays. It was a great signal when Google was new, but it is no longer the primary determinant of quality.

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  2. If spam can get to 6, then the bot's decision makes more sense.

    Reasonably impressed with Google's turnaround time, on the whole. I noticed the blog was down around 1:30 Monday afternoon my time (4:30 Sunday afternoon PST); put in the review request, then back up about 6 PM my time. So same day on a US Sunday between Christmas and New Year's. Decent.

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