Fifteen years ago this month, the age of spam began. Like so many things, it started innocently enough, when a couple of immigration lawyers in Phoenix pitched their services to pretty much everyone who was on the Internet at the time, via the 6,000 newsgroups in existence then.More...

The Official Google Blog has published a series of entries about how the company uses its collected data to make its services better. One post talked about reducing “webspam”, essentially irrelevant search results caused by people working the search ranking system. Google has a whole team devoted to weeding webspam. More...