Internet Content Filtering

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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If you don’t believe Google’s Duplicate Content Filter exists, I have Dramatic Proof their Internet content filter exists and it’s very effective.

On July 5, 2005 I published an article entitled “7 Top Ways to Avoid Link Theft” which was picked up and included as content on other websites.

Before the article was released I checked on Google whether any results already existed for the exact phrase “7 Top Ways to Avoid Link Theft” and there were no listings for that term.

Over the next few weeks I monitored through a search query on Google how many results appeared in Google for the title of my article. One week after publication there were 6,760 results listed in Google, a week later it was 14,100 and it reached a peak of 17,000 results by July 26, 2005.

4 weeks after publication the results in Google had fallen slightly to 16,600.

Almost 6 weeks after publication the results listed in Google had fallen to 44.

In a matter of less than two weeks the number of search results on Google.com for the title of my article had gone from 16,600 to just 44.

In case you’re thinking this is because all these other websites dropped by article and replaced it with other content I should add that a search on Yahoo.com on the same day still showed 14,300 results for my article.

What’s more of these 44 results on Google, more than half consist of listings from the same websites. In other words some sites have the same article duplicated on different pages on their website.

So Google’s Internet Content Filter is not used to remove duplicate listings from the preferred websites it chooses to keep in the search results.

On August 28th, 2005 8 weeks after first publication I distributed the article again to a new list of article sites to repeat the process. After 6 weeks the same article had reached a peak of 5,620 results on Google. Less than 2 weeks later the results had fallen to 217.

For me this was dramatic proof that Google’s Duplicate Internet Content Filter is active and very effective. If you’re wondering if other major search engines have a duplicate content filter I can confirm that Yahoo certainly does. The same article which was once listed on 14,300 sites on Yahoo, has fallen to 344 over the same time period.

From these results it would seem Google takes about 6 to 8 weeks to remove duplicate content using its Duplicate Internet Content Filter.

But the question remaining is just how does Google decide which out of over 16,000 results does it keep and which does it reject?

I have witnessed situations where my own articles appear in results on other websites, but are not listed in the results for my own website.

So clearly Google does not take into account who the originator and author of the original article was when deciding which sites will remain in its search results.

It also seems to have nothing to do with where Google first finds the article.

Some articles I have published to my website for several weeks before releasing them for distribution to other websites.

In that time the Google spiders have visited my site several times and Google has had enough time to work out that the article was first found on my site.

It would be interesting to see if it’s possible to work out what factors Google is using in its Internet Content Filter to decide which results to keep in its listing and which ones to remove. But that’s for another article.
About the Author

Tony Simpson is a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer who brings a touch of reality to building a Web Business. A related report on article distribution is at: http://www.webpageaddons.com/stp/announcerclaim Article Announcer Review - Testing Product Claims

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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Spam Filters Explained
What do they do? How do they work? Which one is right for me?
By Alan Hearnshaw

Spam is a very real problem that many people have to deal with on a daily basis. For those that have decided to do something about it and start to investigate the options available in spam filtering, this article provides a brief introduction to your options and the types of spam filters available.

Despite the bewildering array of spam filters available today, all claiming to the best one of its kind there are really just five filtering methodologies in general use today and all products rely on one, or a combination of these:

Content-Based Filters
In the beginning, there were content-based filters.

These filters scan the contents of the and look for tell-tale signs that the message is spam. In the early days of spamming it was quite simple to look out for Kill Words such as
Lose Weight and mark a message as spam if it was found.

Very soon though, spammers got wise to this and started resorting to all kinds of tricks to get their message past the filters. The days of obfuscation had begun.
We started getting messages containing the phrase L0se Welght (Notice the zero for o and l for i ) and even more bizarre and sometimes quite ingenious variations.
This rendered basic content-based filters somewhat ineffective, although there are one or two on the market now that are clever enough to see through theses attempts and still provide good results.

Bayesian Based Filters
The Reverend Bayes comes to the rescue

Born in London 1702, the son of a minister, Thomas Bayes developed a formula which allowed him to determine the probability of an event occurring based on the probabilities of two or more independent evidentiary events.

Bayesian filters learn from studying known good and bad messages. Each message is split into single word bytes , or tokens and these tokens are placed into a database along with how often they are found in each kind of message.
When a new message arrives to be tested by the filter, the new message is also split into tokens and each token is looked up in the database. Extrapolating results from the database and applying a form of the good reverend s formula, know as a Naive Bayesian formula, the message is given a spamicity rating and can be dealt with accordingly.

Bayesian filters typically are capable of achieving very good accuracy rates (>97% is not uncommon), and require very little on-going maintenance.

Whitelist/Blacklist Filters
Who goes there, friend or foe?

This very basic form of filtering is seldom used on its own nowadays, but can be useful as part of a larger filtering strategy.

A whitelist is nothing more than a list of e-mail addresses from which you wish to accept communications. A whitelist filter would only accept messages from these people and all others would be rejected

A blacklist , conversely, is a list of e-mail addresses - and sometimes IP Addresses (computer identification addresses) - from which communications will not be accepted.

While this may seem like a good idea from the outset, a whitelist methodology is too restrictive for most people and, as virtually all spam e-mails carry a forged from address, there is little point in collecting this address to ban it in future as it is very unlikely to be the same next time.
There are bodies on the internet that maintain a list of known bad sources of e-mail. Many filters today have the ability to query these servers to see if the message they are looking at comes from a source identified by this Internet-based blacklist, or RBL. While being quite effective, they do tend to suffer from false positives where good messages are incorrectly identified as spam. This happens often with newsletters.

Challenge/Response Filters
Open sesame!

Challenge/Response filters are characterised by their ability to automatically send a response to a previously unknown sender asking them to take some further action before their message will be delivered. This is often referred to as a “Turing Test” - named after a test devised by British mathematician Alan Turing to determine if machines could think .

Recent years have seen the appearance of some internet services which automatically perform this Challenge/Response function for the user and require the sender of an e-mail to visit their web site to facilitate the receipt of their message.

Critics of this system claim it to be too drastic a measure and that it sends a message that “my time is more important than yours” to the people trying to communicate with you.

For some low traffic e-mail users though, this system alone may be a perfectly acceptable method of completely eliminating spam from their inbox - one step above the “Whitelist” system outlined above.

Community Filters
A united front

These types of filters work on the principal of “communal knowledge” of spam. When a user receives a spam message, they simply mark it as such in their filter. This information is sent to a central server where a fingerprint of the message is stored.
After enough people have voted this message to be spam, then it is stopped from reaching all the other people in the community.

This type of filtering can prove to be quite effective, although it stands to reason that it can never be 100% effective as a few people have to receive the spam for it to be flagged in the first place. Just like its similar cousin the Internet black list (RBL), this system also can suffer from false positives , or messages incorrectly identified as spam.

Hopefully you are now armed with a little more information to be able to make an informed decision on the best spam filter for you.
For further information, consider reading the reviews and articles found at http://www.whichspamfilter.com

Alan Hearnshaw is the owner of http://www.whichspamfilter.com, a web site which conducts weekly in-depth reviews of current spam filters, provides help and guidance in the fight against spam and provides a useful community forum.
alan@whichspamfilter.com

About the Author

Alan Hearnshaw is a computer programmer and the owner of http://www.WhichSpamFilter.com, a site which provides weekly in-depth spam filter reviews, user help and guidance and a community forum.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The Internet is a great tool for many things, such as doing research, reading the latest news, shopping and staying in touch with family and friends. To borrow from the title of a Clint Eastwood movie, along with the good comes “the bad and the ugly”.

Freedom on the Internet also opens the door for illegal activity, such as emails pretending to be your bank (aka phishing), expression of various ideas - whether you agree with them or not, scams to separate people from their money and content that some find objectionable, like pornography.

While searching the Internet for homeschool support groups, to ask for permission to list their web site as a resource in HomeSchoolEXPOs’ Support Groups & Organizations directory, I became a victim of porn-napping. I didn’t know this term existed until I decided to do research for this newsletter. My purpose was to help other parents, who are short on time, learn about what they can do to protect their children who use the Internet.

Porn-napping happens when a non-pornography domain or web site address becomes inactive and it is purchased by a pornography business. The site might have closed down or the owner didn’t renew their ownership. Once the pornography business owns the address, they post their content on it. Below is an example of how I was porn-napped.

Let’s say there is a homeschool support group called Family Homeschooling. Their web site address is www.familyhomeschooling.com. The group discontinues because all of the children have graduated high school and have gone to college. The parents decide not to renew the ownership of their website address. A pornography business discovers the support groups’ web address is available and decides to buy it. Now that they own the address, they post their content under the domain www.familyhomeschooling.com, with no warning of the content that is coming. Another tactic they may employ is something called a re-direct. This happens when you click on or type in a web site address they have purchased, e.g. www.familyhomeschooling.com, and you are re-directed to another site with their content. Re-directing is not illegal. Many web sites use this feature for functions such as load balancing or redirecting users to a sites new web address because it has changed.

My original plan was to write an article about the steps that parents can to protect their children from pornography and pedophiles. While looking for information, I found a couple of good articles and resources that provide great information for parents. Instead of recreating the wheel, I’m providing the following links for parents to learn more about what they can do to protect their kids when their kids are online.

1. 2005 Software Review of Parental Control and Internet Filtering Software
http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/?ttreng=1&ttrkey=internet+filter

2. Home Internet Filters - Steps Parents Can Take At Home For Filtering Content
http://www.northstar.k12.ak.us/safety/filters.html

3. Parental Control and Internet Child Safety
http://www.protectkids.org/

4. Wired Kids - Online Safety Project for Kids and Teens
http://www.wiredkids.org/

5. NetSmartz Workshop - Interactive games and activities to teach kids what to watch for online to protect themselves.
http://www.netsmartz.org/

6. Parents Can Make Internet Safer for Kids - Article in the Honolulu Advertiser
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Oct/19/tc/tc08p.html

7. SafeKids - Making Technology and the Internet safe for Families
http://www.safekids.com/

8. GetNetWize - The GetNetWise coalition wants Internet users to be only “one click away” from the resources they need to make informed decisions about their family’s use of the Internet.
http://kids.getnetwise.org/

About the Author

Aaron Hyde is a consultant with the 280Group, http://www.280group.com, with over 17 years of industry experience. He homeschools and is the founder of HomeSchoolExpo, http://www.homeschoolexpo.com. HomeSchoolExpo is a new auction site for connecting homeschoolers who want to buy and sell homeschooling books and resources. HomeSchoolExpo also provides store hosting for family friendly businesses.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

The importance of RSS for marketing can no longer be disputed, but do we really understand all the benefits RSS brings to us as marketers, or really understand why we need to use it to get closer to our customers?

WHAT RSS WILL DO FOR YOU AS A MARKETER?

a] Get your content delivered without fail to all of your subscribers.

E-mail delivery rates are dropping, spam is everywhere and it’s getting increasingly difficult to get our marketing content read by our subscribers, prospects and customers. RSS is the way out.

b] Increase your web traffic and your online visibility.

With more and more sites competing for business every day, you need to do everything in your power to increase your online traffic, and RSS will help you get an upper edge.

c] RSS enables you to easily get your content published on dozens and dozens of other sites.

d] It will serve as a platform for ad sales,

e] It will provide advertising opportunities to promote your own business

f] It will help you get more content for your site without you having to write a single word.

WHY YOU NEED RSS, FROM THE END-USER POINT OF VIEW?

a] People want to receive content in a controlled environment where they are in-charge, not the publisher.

b] Delivering content using e-mail is becoming increasingly difficult, due to blacklists, spam filters and over excessive amounts of e-mail in your recipients’ mailboxes.

c] RSS allows you to deliver content beyond your e-zine, giving you more content delivery opportunities.

d] RSS is a natural tool for content syndication, which means easily and instantly delivering your content to hundreds of other content sources, thus creating additional exposure.

e] When using RSS to deliver all of your web site content updates, RSS will actually increase your web site traffic, thus giving your promotional messages more exposure.

f] People are afraid of subscribing to e-mail lists, which makes getting new subscribers difficult; RSS is a whole different story.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Either as an end-user or as business person, content delivery should be one of your top informational concerns.

a] As an end-user you cannot function properly without having relevant access to the information you need. Content delivery mechanisms affect your ability to access this information.

b] As a business person you must understand that your business success, among other things, depends on information, and in large on your ability to deliver it. Without the proper content delivery vehicles you cannot get content in-front of your target audiences, at least not in a relevant fashion.

RSS answers the needs of both.

About the author:

Learn how to take full marketing advantage of RSS and get all the knowledge and how-to information for implementing RSS in your marketing mix, from direct marketing, PR, e-commerce and online publishing to SEO, traffic generation and so on. FREE guide available for immediate download, too. Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/