Corn of the Stalk

In the classical world of Information Retrieval, when no commercial interests survived in the databases, very simple-minded algorithms could be used to generate high quality results. On the World Wide Web, however, the opposite is true. Commercial concerns in the SERPs are a never-ending issue for modern search engines. With every new focus on quality control and growth in relevance prosody, there are thousands of souls (many in the field of SEO) committed to controlling these metrics in order to check the SERPs, typically by aiming to list their sites/pages first.

The sorriest kind of results are what the industry concerns to as "search spam" - pages and sites with little real value that contain primarily re-directs to other pages, lists of links, grated (copied) content, etc. These pages are so irrelevant and useless that search engines are highly focused on getting rid of them from the index. Of course the pecuniary bonuses are similar to junk e-mail although few visit and fewer click on the links (which are what provide the spam publisher with gross), the absolute quantity is the critical factor in developing income.

Other "spam" results rates from sites that are of low quality or affiliate status that search engines would prefer not to list, to high quality sites and businesses that are using the link structure of the web to control the results in their favor. Search engines are focused on clearing out all types of manipulation and hope to finally achieve fully relevant and organic algorithms to determine ranking order. So-called "search engine spammers" wage in a constant battle against these tactics, seeking new loopholes and new methods for manipulation, resulting in a never-ending conflict.