Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

Very interesting article today from Microsoft Research about all of those annoying doorway pages that are all over the Internet these days.  These are the pages that you see often when you search for something, click on one of the links, and get a page full of links and ads.  The underlying report is worth a skim if you want to understand how all of this works.

"Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators."

This means that there is a good possibility that this practice could be shut down.  If this stuff annoys you as much as it does me, this is good news indeed!