Google's BlogSearch is one of my top ways of searching the blogosphere. The service does have its problems though. It lists lots of junk blogs scattered throughout its results.
Try searching for something "spam friendly" yet useful, like "cancer." Yes, there are links to news items. Yes, there are some blogs. However, there are quite a few spam sites. I'd rather not link to them to show you what I mean, but I'll post here some of the URLs (portions of them) and you'll get the idea:
http://www.interestrate.getinfohub.c...mortgage-only/....
http://www.edu.mississippidebtconsolidation.net/
http://delmararguello.myweblog.com/2007/07/25/viagra....
Sometimes the spam noise isn't that bad. It depends on the search. However, it seems like Google could be doing a much better job here.
I don't mind if Google has a "View Spam" option, but by default I'd like to turn it off--even if it slightly hides too many sites.
I'm sure this is a cat and mouse game with the spammers, but it's a battle worth fighting. If a blog consistently links to affiliate sites, it gets tagged. If a blog continually has text excerpts to other articles and product links otherwise, call it spam. Use too many "spam-typical-keywords" in your blog titles, and sorry the blog gets marked as spam. And so on.
From what I've seen, this will knock out some small reseller blogs which often copy/paste text and then add links to their products to sell, but so be it. They probably should be in another category anyway.



Incremental Blogger