Google’s Matt Cutts On “Will Search Spam Go On Forever”

Google’s head of search spam, answered some questions in the Power Searching with Google Hangout on Air #2 on October 2nd. In that video, he was asked by fellow Googler, Dan Russell a Search research scientist at Google, will search spam go on forever?

This question was asked about 36 minutes into the video, where Matt basically said he’s team has done a great job but search spam will go on forever. Here is the video and the transcript (I did my best transcribing):

Dan: There is this constant Spy vs Spy kind of thing…

Matt: Yes.

Dan: And you’re the good spies and then there the bad spies…

Matt: I hope so… Yes.

Dan: So, do you see this going on forever and ever? Or… Do you have job security?

Matt: I would love to automate myself out of a job? You know… What we try to do, is we try to come up with algorithms that will stop the problem at the root. So you don’t want to play whack a mole, you know, you don’t want to get into hand to hand combat with one spammer who can make tens of thousands of domains. You really want to try to figure out, okay… the technique he is using to rank is X, okay so how do we stop it so that X doesn’t work and that will stop that entire class…

Now, in practice, as much as you do, people are coming up with new creative attacks all the time. So we are very much in a… here is an attack today, what’s the attack going to be tomorrow?

But I think if you look at the level of spam over the years, it is relatively rare now that you do a random search and you just get off topic porn or you get something that is completely irrelevant or that leads you to a casino when you didn’t want one.

So we have made good progress, but think there is still some way to go.

Dan: So you’ve got job security, he’s got job security…