I knew it was bad, but this is an indication of just how bad. Philipp Lenssen did a random survey using Blogspot’s random blog url generator and he catalogued 50 blogs hosted on blogspot. 30 of them were spam blogs. If you are a student fishing for ideas on a paper, I think this is really worth an academic paper with a larger sample.
# The Trend Junkie » Blog Archive » The Spamosphere on September 1st, 2005
[...] Interesting read this am on Tim Yang’s blog, where he points to a recent survey that uncovered that an estimated 42% of blogspot content is pure spam or “splogs” or in the case of blogspot, “splots.” That has to make you weary! Phillip Lennsen conducted a random survey, initially of 50 blogspot blogs that registered 40-60% as spam, then spread the sample to 100 and found that an estimated 42% were “splots.” Interesting stuff to read, Phillip goes on stating: “If you’d consider Blogspot a community, it would be a very unhealthy one. If you consider it just another free web hosting service, than the amount of spam still reflects badly on Google. As for those spam blogs which try to boost their Google rankings, it’s ironic that this is done on Google’s own servers. That’s as ridiculous as a cleaning lady with very dirty shoes.” [...]
# Jon on September 6th, 2005
The irony is that Google with one arm tries to be the police and stop web spam, and with the other arm they are a huge supplier of web spam.