Search engine giant Google announced new measures this week which aim to stop “irrelevant and low-quality” websites from appearing in the listings for its popular Chrome internet browser.

Google said that it will be launching an extension for the browser designed to block sites not deemed to be up to scratch from the search results. The crowdsourcing extension will be available as an add-on and allows the users of Chrome to let Google know when they find links in their search results that are clearly spam – including websites that are created by content farms to lure users to locations where malware lurks and spam is rife.

The extension then blocks such links from all Google Chrome searches in the future, although it gives users the option to unblock certain sites if they later decide to do so.

The search engine said this week that the new extension is currently being trialled to see whether it can help improve Google’s search rankings by cutting out spam and low-quality sites as part of an ongoing campaign against superfluous or irrelevant search results. Google has been stung in recent weeks by criticisms from some quarters that it is suffering from declining quality when it comes to its results pages.

Last month, Google principle engineer Matt Cutts responded to some of this criticism, insisting that spam levels were actually falling.

“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower,” he insisted in an article on the Google blog. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts under way to continue to improve our search quality.”

Google · Google Chrome · malware · spam · spam prevention

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