I guess you heard it before, but doesn’t an open-source search engine open itself up for blackhat Search Engine Optimization?
Potentially. Let’s say it takes spammers six weeks to reverse engineer a closed-source search engines latest spam detecting algorithm. With an open source engine, this can be done much faster. But in either case, the spammers will eventually figure out how it works; the only difference is how quickly. So the best anti-spam techniques, open or closed source, are those that continue to work even when their mechanism is known. Also, if you, e.g., remove detected spammers from the index for six months, then there’s not much they can do, once detected, to change their sites to elude detection. And if your spam detectors are based on statistical analyses of good and bad example sites, then you can, overnight, notice new patterns and remove the spammers before they have a chance to respond. So open source can make it a little harder to stop spam, but it doesn’t make it impossible. And closed-source search engines have not been able to use secrecy to solve this problem. I think the closed-sour
