Google Report Reveals Significant Year on Year Increase in Search Spam Detection

In 2019, Google reported that it had detected around 25 billion pages of scam each day. This clearly wasn’t the entirety of spam that exists on the internet, but Google does tend to face an uphill battle in these matters and because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up requiring massive amounts of resources the tech giant can be forgiven for having done as much as it already has, particularly since its current success rate is really quite stellar if you think about it.

However, 2020 has seen a massive increase in spam detection, with Google’s report for the year revealing that a 60% increase in detection rates has been seen. This means that Google detected around 40 billion spam pages for the year of 2020, and this massive increase means that spam sites are probably going to have a tougher time of it in this regard. In order to better understand what spam actually is, at least from Google’s point of view, you have to think about the meaning behind the term.

Spam can refer to a website that has been hacked in some way, shape or form, any kind of scam or behavior that can be classified as fraudulent as well as a variety of other things that happen to fall under this banner. As for the reason behind Google having more success this year over last year, the tech giant credits its increased usage of AI for this sort of thing. Basically AI based algorithms have had a more accurate detection rate for spam, and while Google still isn’t capable of detecting all of the spam from the world wide web, it’s pretty clear that the tech giant is taking big strides in the right direction.

The coronavirus pandemic has played a huge role in Google’s decision to focus as much as possible on targeting spam. A lot of the spam categories that have been focused on in the past year have had to do with the coronavirus and various kinds of misinformation that people might be trying to spread around it all of which has the potential to cause massive problems since if people happen to be uninformed they will not make the kinds of decisions that can go towards protecting them from the coronavirus pandemic in the first place.

Some people might get confused between this report and a report that Google released previously about it removing over 3 billion ads. However, that is an entirely different department as far as Google is concerned. Ads that are posted on Google platforms are directly Google’s responsibility since it is giving these fraudulent ads the chance to get exposure to a lot more people. However, Google’s spam detection in the internet in general is something that the company is doing more for the common good rather than anything else.

This shows that Google has the right idea about preventing spam from gaining a massive foothold on the internet, and it proves that the future of the internet might just end up being a bit brighter than it had seemed a couple of decades ago when things were more uncertain.


Read next: Google is saving about $1 billion a year, as its employees are working from home due to pandemic situation
Previous Post Next Post