There’s no doubt that spam is a problem, and unfortunately, it is a growing one. According to the Spam Clock recently introduced from Blekko, 1 million new spam pages are created every hour.

Rich Skrenta and the team at Blekko developed the search engine with the goal of eliminating spam in search. In addition, they launched the Spam Clock to help raise awareness of the growing problem. He told WebProNews that the amount of spam was “proliferating.”

“There are about 100 billion urls on the Web today, and we think that the majority are actually spam,” he said.

In talking about the impact of spam on the Internet, Skrenta pointed out that, today, most urls are not created by people. Instead, machines create them, which means the costs associated are slim to none. As a result, he said, “We’ve seen an erosion of quality on certain verticals.”

He compares the problems of today to email spam and said that the Web needs to apply a filtering model to remove it.

Interestingly, the clock’s release has sparked a great deal of discussion in the tech community regarding spam and its impact on the Web and search. Here are a few of the stories that have resulted:

Spam Clock Tallies Junk on the Internet

Blekko Launches Spam Clock To Keep Pressure On Google

Spam Clock Illustrates the Problem of Link Relevancy for Google, Bing, and Other Search Engines

Although some of the reports of late have attacked Google, Skrenta said that the search giant is not completely responsible for the problem. The real issue is that, as the Web grows, it gets worse. For this reason, he believes that Google’s approach of using algorithms to detect the bad content is losing its effectiveness. The rise of content farms has added to this issue and makes the search results inaccurate.

Skrenta and Blekko think it is easier to identify the good content and separate it into verticals such as health and finance. He said that they want to create thousands of categories in order to “clean up the entirety of the query stream.”