Many have noticed the recent rash of spam-blogs ravaging the blogosphere; while they've been around for a while the magnitude of the latest wave is simply mind-boggling. The results have all but ruined most blog search engines. I thought I'd take minute to explain how this happens, since we've managed to effectively avoid the problem.

The only services affected by the blog spam are the ones that indiscrimanetly add feeds from ping services (like Ping-o-matic or FeedMesh) without any form of verification. When you sort results by date, this is a death blow to your service. I've always said it was a matter of time before this happened to blogs; now that Google and Yahoo are in the game, it's finally happening at massive scale. I also feel that, while it would be nice if Google were to fix this problem, ultimately the responsibility for providing a quality service rests on the shoulders of the individual services themselves, not Google and/or Blogger.

As regards Blogdigger, although we do get data from the FeedMesh (and will be opening our own node...shortly), we don't add feeds in willy-nilly. Hence the close-to-non-existent amounts of blog spam in our results. This approach is not pefect, as it sometimes delays new blogs from getting into our system, but our philosophy is we'd rather you get less results that all matter than more results that mostly don't. And if you happen to find a site in our index that does contribute spam (or you just don't like it) you can easily exclude it from your search using the Exclude button on the results page (then re-subscribe to the RSS feed).