Earlier this month, I wrote about the problem of pharmacy spam sneaking into Google News results. Well, the problem has now reached epidemic proportions.

As recently as a couple of months ago, you could track terms like “Canadian pharmacies” and “no prescription pharmacies” and “online pharmacies” on Google News to find the latest news on drug reimportation, online pharmacy safety, and other issues that we follow here at the Online Pharmacy Blog.

Today, spam has virtually choked off our ability to use Google News to follow what’s going on in the online pharmacy world. And it’s goes beyond online pharmacies. Even broader terms like “prescription drugs” have succumb to the spam problem.

And don’t even think about searching for news items on Viagra, Cialis or Levitra with Google News!

Apparently the reason for the spam problem is that a lot of legitimate news sites have set up community forums and other sections of their sites where they allow visitors to post stories for publication without any editing or moderating in advance. Spammers have picked up on this little opening and are now driving through it with a semi truck.

Just to give you an idea of what you’re dealing with if you search for specific terms using Google News, or if you sign up for Google News Alerts:

• “Canadian pharmacies”: 12 of the first 13 Google News results are spam.
• “online pharmacies”: 10 of the first 11 Google News results are spam.
• “no prescription pharmacies”: 8 of the first 12 Google News results are spam.
• “prescription drugs”: Even on a day when Michael Jackson’s apparent prescription drug overdose is the biggest news story in the world, the first page of Google News results still has one spam entry.

Google needs to fix this. And Google’s news sources need to start moderating their community sections, because this has gotten ridiculous.

Tags: spam

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 2:42 am and is filed under pharmacy spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.