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I run a search on my name over at Google Blogs every month or so. It’s interesting to see what pops up. Just ran one this month, and was shocked to see how many splogs and feed scrapers were picking up chunks of my content and using my name. It’s utterly disgusting. Page one of the search results is really the only relevant one. The rest of the search results are made up of 95% splog crap and 5% decent results.

Splogs are the new spam, but they’re much worse. They poison the internet itself, and because they’re much more permanent than spam, which can be easily deleted, they’re a much bigger problem. I was disheartened to see that so many splogs made it into the Google Blogs search results. But, to Google’s credit, many of the splog links I clicked on (hosted at Blogger) pointed to non-existent sites. They’ve disabled or removed them already, even though they still showed up in the search results.

This is why I believe blog search engines still have a lot of growth to do. People talk about Google Blog Search being better than Technorati, etc., but I think it’s still too early to tell. Obviously, given the amount of splog content I get when searching for my name shows tells me Google Blog Search is nowhere near the accuracy of Google Search. And that’s not necessarily bad — yet. Google’s had time to hone Google Search since the early nineties, while their Blog Search has just been born. That’s possibly another reason why blog search results haven’t yet been integrated into the regular web search.

I really think being able to filter out splog content effectively is where blog search engines need to concentrate their efforts. I don’t necessarily care so much about being indexed immediately, but rather, being able to find relevant search results. It’s true, I get most of the traffic to my sites from searches, and Google serves up the most visitors to my sites — thank you, Google! — but given that I get a lot of visits to stuff I wrote weeks, months and even years ago, I can wait a few days for my content to pop up in the blog search, if I know it’s going to accurately indexed, and no splog crap is going to show up next to it, like it does now.

And another thing, and this one really gets my goose. How can sploggers get approved for AdSense (because I see AdSense ads on their splogs) when it took me three tries and over four months to get approved for this blog last year? Something tells me the vetting process at AdSense isn’t tuned correctly when legitimate blogs have a hard time getting approved but sploggers can get approved and go on reaping income for some time before they’re shut down.

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