When NY Times starts writing about spam, you know it's becoming dangerous. John Markoff put together an interesting article about search engine spamming, which any normal webmaster hates and rouge 'search engine website optimizers' just love.

The article talks about a Microsoft research paper which has shown that some keywords, like 'drugs', end up with over 30% of fake (junk) websites listed among legit websites:

"They discovered that the average spam density - a measure of the percentage of Web pages that contain only advertisements - was 11 percent for 1,000 keywords they used in their research.
The researchers said large advertisers were to blame for a significant share of the spam problem.
"Ultimately, it is advertisers' money that is funding the search-spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the Web with low-quality content and reducing Web users' productivity," they write in the paper, which will be presented in May at the International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta."

OK, whoever searches for Vi@gr@ online is to blame only himself if he does not land on a real website. Ever heard of Drugstore you shy surfers?

The most surprising thing though, was that most of the phony websites were hosted by only two web hosting companies. I say, close them down.