Google's AI Helped Identify 6x More Spam Sites Last Year
Google is getting better at spotting spam—according to Google.
The search giant this week announced that it caught 200 times more spam sites in 2021 compared to when it first started looking nearly two decades ago. And it has SpamBrain to thank.
Launched in 2018, the AI platform was designed to continuously evolve and address all types of abuse—starting with spam. In 2021, SpamBrain "identified nearly six times more spam sites" than the year before, helping to reduce hacked and gibberish spam on hosting platforms by as much as 75%.
Hacked spam involves cybercriminals infecting a website with spyware or malware in order to steal login credentials or direct people to malicious pages. Gibberish hacks, meanwhile, swamp sites with nonsensical sentences chock full of keywords, aimed at boosting their online ranking.
"With an increasing volume of sophisticated spam being produced every day, SpamBrain's ability to identify disruptive and malicious behaviors among billions of web pages has allowed us to keep more than 99% of searches spam-free," principal Google engineer Cody Kowk stated in a blog announcement.
Beyond battling traditional web spam, the company last year launched a link spam update to identify unnatural URLs, updated its algorithms to stop scams, and extended SpamBrain to address online harassment.
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