The NEW search engines seem to return more and more websites that are simply directories that may or may not relate to my search term, but have lots of Adsense Ads (or other ads as well).

Perhaps its time for a NEWER search engine that ONLY returns AD FREE websites in its generic search results.

One can only dream….

Avoiding collateral damage and not filtering (and damaging) a few innocent legitimate sites and AdSense publishers would require a bit more effort.

That said, I agree with Bob. A sophisticated profile of parasitic sites shouldn’t be that difficult to develop and screen manually. I manually screen records in my own database, a bit tedious but v. good ROI.

If one is to believe your Halloween quote ‘My name is Inigo Montoya. You spam my index. Prepare to die!’, one would also think you are aggressively seeking solutions to halt the ever-increasing scrappers / spammers. To that end, I would propose to you what appears to be a relatively easy solution:

Follow the money.

Since AdSense is the cash cow that motivates the spammers, why not use the AdSense data to weed out the unscrupulous pages they generate. Accounts of spammers could be easily identified by their footprints:
1) Thousands or millions of different phrases.
2) Phrase churning as their sites are banned.
3) Clicks across hundreds or thousands of sites.
4) Multiple sites of an account holder get banned.

Once identified, the accounts should be closed and the creators banned from AdSense. Due to the time consuming, manual labor of creating and verifying multiple new AdSense accounts, the ROI of this type of spamming would quickly drop below the point of profitability.

Since one of my hats says ‘Database Programmer’ on it, I know this could be done with an amazingly insignificant amount of effort.

Is the extra couple hundred grand of revenue really worth harassing your users through that extra page and click ?

No, HAL was the villian of the piece, but I don’t desire computers (I dominate and exploit them) and this “touchy feely” thing is creepy and disgusting, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention Dave.

The line about the pod-bay door is spoken by HAL, a prototypical rogue computer that refuses to open the pod-bay door for Dave. Often used in situations where a computer is ****ing over a human.