Does Google hire spammers?

[viggen]

...or any other search engine?

I mean like you heard the stories of succesfull hackers getting pretty good jobs sometimes at security firms etc...

...now do the search engines the same, or is this just a silly question...

cheers
viggen

[rustybrick]

I asked Yahoo! this and they said no, never.

[randfish]

MSN certainly gets the opinions of spammers - particularly in last year's search champs. Google - Matt Cutts in particular gets lots of input from those guys at conferences, private meet-ups, etc. Yahoo! I don't know about, but I can say that no one in search has ever reported a prominent spammer joining a search engine...

It does seem like a natural move, though - why has it never happened? I can't honestly say.

[rustybrick]

Found it http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001163.html

Tim Mayer came over to me, when I was sitting on some sofa, kind of off in the corner. I asked him he they (Yahoo!) hires top notch spammers in an effort to combat spam. You know, like how governments and large companies hire hackers to prevent being hacked. Tim said they have not, they just hire 'engineers'. Which got me thinking, what if the Yahoo! people decided to pass some special gas through the air at this party. The gas contained a drug that turned spammers into the extreme opposite of a spammer (just a note to readers, I am not using the word 'spammer' in a derogatory fashion). I told Tim, that if they had this solution, it might solve a huge chunk of the spam issues they have overnight. Of course I was joking, everyone at the party were clean, white hats.

[rustybrick]

Great topic, held off to write about it this morning at http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003275.html

[pk_synths]

I'm sure they hire ex spammers. It would be silly not too. I don't think any current spammer would give up the luxury of not having to go into an office everyday if they ran a successful "business"

[mugshot]

I don't see why they wouldn't "hire" or "contract" spammers. That's probably one of the better investments any of the engines can make instead of trying to figure it our themselves on how to fight spam.

All G,Y and M have smart biz dev people working with them and if one of the suggestions at a biz meeting was not "let's hire spammer_001 to work for us" - then it could be an ego thing

But yes, to me its a no brainer to hire the top spammers at a ridiculous salary but then again, spammers are rebels at heart....and they may not even want to join those engine-*****s at all...it all depends on the rewards :-)

[randfish]

Greg posted this at SEOmoz:

Having dome some consulting with search engines, I can tell you that those types of offers have been made. But the problem the engines face is they aren't willing to pay the kind of money it would take to get a prominent dark lord to come to their side.

An engine like MSN has 2 or three years of growing pains to go through before they will even be close to having the same kind of filtering and detection capabilities of Google. That fact will generate a significant amount of money for those who exploit the holes.

If you are one of those people, helping MSN fix the holes ends up costing you a lot of money. In order to overcome that, MSN would have to be willing to shell out enough money to compensate the SEO for his potential lost income. So far, they haven't been willing to do that.

I think that's a fairly reasonable explanation.

[webmidas]

I think that's a fairly reasonable explanation.

Well i m sure they hire spammers and they must be paying them well.
Big companies have big pockets so hiring a spammer is not a problem for big companies.
whatever be the package of a spammer,company will always getter a better ROI.

[Thomas Schulz]

There's the issue though that it is probably easier being a spammer than being the one trying to contain spam. Of course, as spamming becomes more and more complicated against a huge team of search engine engineers the odds may have evened out, at least least we can hope so