For many the term web spam simply means unwanted junk email, but in the search community the definition of spam tends to be far more comprehensive and, to me, confusing. Obviously totally irrelevant junk is spam, but what about poorly written, marginally relevant information written by a seventh grade student about her class project dealing with asbestosis?
Few would call THAT grade school project "spam", yet most internet professionals would say "spam" if the *exact same information" was prepared by an outsourced team in an effort to rank for the term "asbestosis" becuase it fetches big money on the pay per click market.
In this example intention is defining the material as spam and that approach bothers me. I appreciate he fact that major search engines lean in the direction of objective measurements of relevancy, which probably do not attempt to factor intention into the equation except in extreme cases where, for example, Matt's spam team would ban a site for manipulation.
I suppose in this case they'd probably apply different metrics to the two sites above though I'm guessing they very rarely apply non-objective analysis. For one thing it's not scalable. For another it's hard (impossible?) to define subjective criteria.
Joe Duck 