WebProNews

Microsoft has unveiled their new web spam filtering project at Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View. The goal is to have their new filtering technology incorporated within their new search engine when it launches later this year.

According to vnunet.com, the technology uses a statistical analysis to locate potential spam pages. No further details about MSN Search's spam filtering technology were made available.

Spam techniques, such as site mirroring and link farms, are designed to trick search engines in order to achieve higher rankings on the result page. Link farms raise rankings by creating unearned links - the MSN Search engine will apparently measure links to a site to help determine the value of that page (as do Google, Yahoo and Teoma).

Site mirroring involves duplicating a site and hosting it at different domain. Mirror sites are then linked together in an attempt to appear more relevant.

These are just two examples of the type of search engine spamming that MSN is attempting to curb. Microsoft believes that for 1 billion webpages, 8% of them are spam pages (80 million).

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.