Google's Paul Haahr, a ranking lead in the search department, said on Twitter that he believes that "web search engines have considered spam-fighting a core competency (and competitive advantage) since the early days."
He said this on Twitter when arguing about if "platforms" are doing enough to combat spam and low quality content.
I’d argue that web search engines have considered spam-fighting a core competency (and competitive advantage) since the early days.
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) April 17, 2019
The conversation then went into how Google handled web search differently then how they may have handled Blogpost:
I think my only knowledge of Blogger was from that first meeting we had after you folks were acquired, so I’ll defer to you on that. Does seem like a mistake. (We certainly cared about spam on Blogspot inside search.)
— Paul Haahr (@haahr) April 17, 2019
But either way - when Google first launched, they didn't think they had to worry about spam. Their founders did say originally they were unspammable. It was not until later that they invested a huge amount and still do, into spam fighting.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
