Google wants users to help spot spam in search results

Google took action on nearly 90,000 user reports of spam in its Search in 2017 and has now asked more users to come forward and help the tech giant spot and squash spam.

According to Juan Felipe Rincon, Global Search Outreach Lead at Google, the automated Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems are constantly working to detect and block spam.

"Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems phishy. Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse," Rincon said in a blog post.

"You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. You can also alert us to any issue with Google search by clicking on the 'Send feedback' link at the bottom of the search results page," he added.

Last year, Google sent over 45 million notifications to registered website owners, alerting them to possible problems with their websites which could affect their appearance in search.

"Just as Gmail fights email spam and keeps it out of your inbox, our search spam fighting systems work to keep your search results clean," Rincon said.

In 2017, Google conducted over 250 webmaster meetups and office hours around the world reaching more than 220,000 website owners.

"Last year, we sent 6 million manual action messages to webmasters about practices we identified that were against our guidelines, along with information on how to resolve the issue," the Google executive said.

With AI-based systems, Google was able to detect and remove more than 80 per cent of compromised sites from search results last year.

"We're also working closely with many providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them fight spammers that abuse forums and comment sections," the blog post said.