[Ryan_IRL]

The only benefit I can see to Google are a lot of those spam sites rely on AdSense to make their money. If it makes sense for a developer to register 100 domains and game some keywords, then they must be making a little money.

[smokinn]

That "only benefit" is a pretty massive one considering AdSense accounts for nearly all of Google's profit.

[rkalla]

Agreed.

Google shared with us early last year that the revenue split on Adsense is 68% (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...) - meaning you keep 68% of what they are paid to run the ad and they keep 32%.

You can imagine some very respectable proportion of their income every year is the 1/3 coming from spam/scraped/etc. adsense placements.

Another interesting article on HN just new is that Google's algorithms already seem to know what crap content is and what good content is: http://blog.obiefernandez.com/content/2011/01/google-probabl...

and my guess is that Google will only roll out improved search results when the cost to the company is great enough to justify the loss of income.

It is a publicly traded company, I don't think Google can just cut out millions of dollars of revenue from their bottom line because they want to not be evil - the shareholders would probably ask for people's heads on platters.

Of course only Google knows the extent of which their income-from-spam is, but I imagine it is significant otherwise they would have solved that problem already as the interest in Duck Duck GO, Blekko and Bing/Yahoo continues to rise/be-discussed-more (Don't know if the ACTUAL usage suggests that people are doing more than just talking or moving over to using different services full time)

Google's compute power is other-worldly. This WP article doesn't do it justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform#Data_centers

and I have had a hard time trying to find an article that was written 2 years ago about the data centers around the globe that Google has built. The scale is unbelievable of each installation and there are something like 30 around the globe right now: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/11/map-of-all-google-data-c...

More than nefarious under-dealings, I think this situation literally snuck up on Google and by the time the publicly-traded company had algorithms to determine the extent of the shenanigans, they realized it would have a noticeable effect on their bottom line if they simply culled all those results out in one day.

They are either going to roll out changes in stages and slowly increase the quality while keeping an eye on what that does to Adsense income and really publicize each change so they rebuild trust with all of us, or they will respond heavy-handidly in a year or so with a "new algorithm change" that "online publishers are up in arms about!" again.

My guess is on the slow-and-gradual approach with a big publicity boost so we are shown they care and are working on it Matt Cutts-style :)

While I've noticed the lagging quality in their search, I still use the Big-G... it's fast for me and gives me accurate results. Then again I mostly search for tech, if I was searching for weight loss, health, sex, appliances or any other topic that is DOMINATED by ads, I would have given up and gone back to using a damn phone book a while ago.

[notahacker]

With any luck, Bing (who have no monetary incentive not to block Adsense spam; and a bigger marketing budget and reach than DDG/Blekko) will start piling on the pressure by aggressively pruning their index.

Ultimately I'd guess Google's shareholders will be even more worried about lost search market share (particularly if it's early adopter migration) than Adsense revenue dips...

[alain94040]

Google's compute power is other-worldly

Actually it's not. I could cite hundreds of examples, but here's one: when I wrote a blog post about getting a huge traffic boost for my startup following on some Mark Cuban in PR Newswire, I titled my post "take the elevator, not the stairs", and Google AdSense served ads for Thyssen elevators. That's how smart it is.

[btilly]

Sorry, but you're wrong.

The fact that they don't always have it doing the smart thing you'd want them to do in no way lessens the fact that Google has a lot of compute power that they are throwing at a lot of problems.

[qeorge]

Nit: AdSense is profitable, but AdWords is even more profitable. If I'm reading it correctly, AdWords brought in 67% of their 2010 ad revenue vs. 30% for AdSense:

http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

[zaphar]

That is incorrect. Adsense is only one way that google publishes ads. According to their 2009 earnings reports: "Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.04 billion, or 31% of total revenues"

That is hardly nearly all of googles profits. A significant portion to be sure but not all.

You can see the full breakdown here: http://investor.google.com/earnings/2009/Q4_google_earnings....

[Ryan_IRL]

Yeah, it sounded more tongue-in-cheek in my head than it comes across in the comment. If this is the reason we see spam results, then the benefit must outweigh the negative effect of potentially pissing of users.

[jarin]

Reading blackhat SEO forums is enlightening. A lot of these guys operate large setups where they convert a few dollars of AdWords clicks at a time into a few more dollars in AdSense revenue by funneling the traffic around in various ways. Multiply by a couple hundred or a couple thousand servers, and you're talking about some serious cash.