How to reduce splogs in Google blog search

The unfortunate truth is that search is filled with splogs. Spammers have figured out just as quickly as the rest of us have that blogs are easy to set up, free, and very good at showing up in search results.

Trying to get through a page of Google BlogSearch results can be like trying to bullseye wamprats with a T-16 (Star Wars? Anyone?). Although they seem to be getting less and less effective, there are a few tricks to searching more effectively, so here’s one of them.

Let’s say I go to BlogSearch and I put in the keywords “motorizr z6tv” (English only) Here’s what shows up on my screen:

I’m willing to bet there are some posts in there that are nabbed from other blogs or press releases or just well disguised spam.

If I run the same search but take out Blogspot blogs by adding “-blogspot” to the search string (sorry Google!), the results look like this:

Now, if I run the same search with blogspot, I get to see all those posts that we pruned with our previous search. Google is going to show me 15 of them: (click to biggie-size).

I clicked through all of those, and I only found three posts that aren’t total regurgitations (but to be fair, they don’t actually say anything, they just appear to be original). That’s a list with 80% spam, removed from your results with one swift stroke.

Not to shabby, eh?