Yesterday, the Yahoo! Search Blog posted the last of their three-part interview series with Yahoo! Research Fellow/VP of Emerging Search Technology/All-Around Search Maven Andrei Broder (we covered part 2 here). The trilogy winds down as Broder answers questions from YSB readers, including a couple of interesting ones about spam and blog search.
Broder was first asked how he felt about Alta Vista’s collapse. He returned a curiously Vulcan-esque response, describing what happened rather than his emotional reaction to what happened. He said that the erstwhile search leader (and his old stomping grounds) suffered from “almost perfect bad timing,” squandering its technology advantage while operating a bad business model. ‘Yes, Spock, but how did it make you feel?’ Maybe it’s still too soon.
He was on more familiar footing while discussing blog search, and in particular why it’s not that great:
“If you look at web search in general, the biggest help comes from metadata, anchor text, links, web graph analysis, etc. For blogs we have very little useful metadata. And even if you do have metadata for blogs, it is often wrong, or you can’t trust it, so you use it very little.
Broder also argued that blogs are often contextually confusing, for search engines and other entities. “Even a human doesn’t understand what’s going in a blog if dropped into the middle of it.” (Do we smell a Tron remake for the blog age? …Sorry, our nerd is showing, and we digress).
Finally, the answer to quashing spam? Make it too expensive. Even if you delete every de…um, ‘shmebt shmonsolidation’ email you receive, enough people are clicking on them to make the business worthwhile. “…people think spammers are kids up to no good, but it is not. Spam is about economics.” This seems to speak to Yahoo!’s recent plan
to charge email marketers a fee for a guaranteed email delivery. But Broder thinks that with the increasing personalization of search, spam could become more difficult as a rule since it’s “hard to make robots that behave as humans.” A fine observation, but spammers are people, too; we’re afraid they’ll have not enough difficulty adjusting to the personal age of search.
