I am not sure how new or old this is, but this is my first encounter with Yahoo! actually reporting on a SPAM site in its search results.  I always knew that the search engines reported harmful sites in the sense that your computer can potentially be infected with a virus or spyware if you click-thru and visit particular sites, but Yahoo! has went further and is reporting sites as harmful if they send unsolicited emails. 

The function is powered by McAfee so I would assume the data is collected from McAfee spam filtering results.  It is only a guess, but I would conclude that the function is triggered by the number of SPAM votes a particular email receives and the association with the domain name will in effect have a negative SPAM tag.  The site I came across is actually a large news station in the local area, which means either they are sending unsolicited emails or many people report it as SPAM in their Yahoo! inbox. 

It’s only a matter of time that other search engines will adopt the data usage of SPAM reports in emails and begin filtering search results by the number of SPAM reports the domain receives in the email client from visitors.  If the domain isn’t good enough for email readers, then why would it be good enough for search users?  I’ve made this far-fetched claim back in 2006, see here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1742186&postcount=12

I am making this claim again today, that search engines use the SPAM votes to flag sites and give value to sites.

Share This