The latest case occurred Wednesday when America Online's AOL Search and its technology partner Inktomi began displaying thousands of search results that linked to a Web site based in Russia. Web spamming, a term used to describe how sites trump . . .

The latest case occurred Wednesday when America Online's AOL Search and its technology partner Inktomi began displaying thousands of search results that linked to a Web site based in Russia. Web spamming, a term used to describe how sites trump legitimate search results with their own pages, has been going on since the birth of search engines. But this time, Web spammers have found a savvier technique.

Spammers copy a Web page and embed metatags into its source code with instructions for a search engine's robots to revisit the duplicate every day but withhold from caching it. The result is effective: False Web pages disguised as legitimate sites appear high in a search engine's rankings.

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