Google and Yahoo news get gamed by spammers

As reported by Jeremy Wagstaff in his Loose wire blog, comment spammers have managed to invade the news search. An example: search on Google news for "ringtones" shows the top hits are all spam.

I just tried it myself, and the results page is cleaner now, but spam still shows up on the first page. A cursory glance shows that the problem comes from Google crawling the comments on the news articles at vibe.com.

(By the way, as a side note: stay away from web sites that give away "free" ringtones. Nothing is free, and in the case, you'll be paying via all the text message spam you'll get for the rest of your life. I'll be discussing this in my next post.)