Google Allows Users to Block Sites from Search Results

     There has been recent controversy over whether or not Google's search results have been becoming less reliable, making sites that one would not find valuable coming up at the top. I talked a lot about this in a recent blog post. Google changed it's algorithm to try to bring higher quality sites up in the search results, and whether or not that worked has also been debated. Now Google, although they are keeping the algorithm change, is giving the user control.
     The new feature allows users to block all results from a specific website from their search results by clicking a link under the site in the results. The actual link is located directly under the website in the search result, next to the Cached and Similar buttons, and reads, "Block all [example.com] results".
     Google announced this feature yesterday on their official blog, and is rolling it out over the next few days. If you don't see it now, expect to see it soon.
     This is yet another attempt by Google to try to improve their results. It seems like a good idea, and it is definitely the first that actually allows human input. It seems like there should be an easier way to block a website, because I don't want to have to go back to Google search results to do it, but for now it should be an effective way to keep unwanted sites out of the search results.

CrunchBase Information

Google

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52% of Computer Users Look at Spam

According to a study released by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), 52% of computer users said that they have clicked on a spam e-mail.

Why? Seventeen percent said that they made a mistake, 12% said that they were interested in the product or service being offered, 13% said they simply had no idea why they did it, and another 6% "wanted to see what would happen."

Even though only a small percentage of computer users actually click on spam to try and purchase something, it remains profitable, as over 94% of email is spam, according to The New York Times.

[via Ars Technica]

Email Spam Damages the Environment

McAfee – the maker of personal computer security software – has reported that spam is not only a nuisance that hinders productivity, it also damages the environment and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

The company has released the Carbon Footprint of Spam, which says that the annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours. That's equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline.

The study looked at global energy expended to create, store, view and filter spam in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

McAfee points to late 2008 as an example of the potential energy savings of stopping spam. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline, global spam volume dropped 70%. According to McAfee, the energy saved during the time it took spammers to rebuild their sending capacity was equal to taking 2.2 million cars off the road that day, proving the impact of the 62 trillion spam e-mails that are sent each year.

Read more, including critics of the report.

[via Yahoo Tech]

Spam Makes up 94% of Email

Spam – those ever-present and annoying drug ads, announcements of lottery winnings, or dating services that show up in your inbox – make up about 94% of all email, according to The New York Times. This is back up to the level of last October.

Briefly, at the end of 2008, the amount of spam traffic was cut by 70% after the large Internet providers knocked offline a California web-hosting server that spammers were using to coordinate email attacks.

According to The Times, this year, average spam volumes have increased about 1.2% each day. And, “what the spammers have been using to rebuild is more technically advanced than what got taken out and is itself a more resilient technology,” explains a spokesperson for an email security company.

Spam, Spam -- Wonderful Spam?

According to our Information Technology Department here at the City of Troy (the Library is a department of the City), in a typical week, the City receives 234,251 spam emails. Our spam-blocking software stops 93% of the emails, but that still leaves over 14,000 that get delivered.

That's 88 spam emails per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, spread over 600+ Troy email accounts.

That's a lot of spam!

OtherInbox: My New Favorite Spam-Annihilator

If you are one of the many millions of people that suffers from spam or general inbox clutter, then you may be interested in a new email service at OtherInbox.com.

Otherinbox takes a different approach to email by allowing the user to create custom email addresses for each of his or her different social or shopping sites. Otherinbox organizes your email by site in an effort to manage spam and keep control of your inbox.

Here's a better description from the site:

OtherInbox is the email address I use for all the stuff I don't want coming to my main email address -- mostly shopping, news and social networking. Pretty much any time I'm not giving my email address to a real person I use my OtherInbox. That way, my main Inbox only has important stuff in it and everything else is in my OtherInbox. Once it's in there, OtherInbox automatically organizes everything for me into folders for each website. This saves me time because I can jump right to the messages I care about and easily ignore the ones that I'm not interested in reading right now. It also shows me what's really going on with my email address; if someone sells my information to spammers I know right away and can stop it.

How does it work? Instead of just having one email address, such as jbaer1975@gmail.com, I have unlimited email addresses at my own domain name, josh.otherinbox.com. I don't have to set them up ahead of time, I can just make them up as I go along. I give out a different email address to every website: Amazon gets amazon@josh.otherinbox.com and Facebook gets facebook@josh.otherinbox.com. This way OtherInbox can reliably sort everything coming back into folders. If anyone sells my email address I will know exactly who is responsible and I can Block that one email address so that I never see their emails again. It's powerful!

I've been using the site for several months and it is absolutely fantastic. The benefits to this system is that I can actually see who is spamming my email with unwanted messages, and block them from continuing.

The only downside to the program is that its in private beta still. Fortunately, for The Tech Desk readers, we have been given beta invites to give-away!

To get started visit this site and register for a free account. Then say goodbye to spam!