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Two Ex-Googlers are part of the management team that recently launched a vertical search engine aimed at lead generation for the real estate rental industry. Dan Daugherty, President and CEO, and Tim Moynihan, COO, lead rentBits.com and RentMarketer.com. Both execs worked for Google operations in the Mountain states region.

RentBits.com hopes to develop the most comprehensive index of available rental properties, a niche overlooked by Zillow but currently owned by Craigslist.

RentMarketer.com offers property managers a technology platform to publish their listings on more than 60 rental classifieds websites. The distribution network claims to have the potential to reach about 9.3 million people. The software platform includes free phone and email tracking plus a click-to-call feature.

rentBits.com hopes to carve out its niche among the growing number of vertical search engines. As Google fights Web spam to maintain relevant results, Web 2.0 vertical search engines are popping up in the financial services, legal services and travel industries.

Earlier this month, Virgin Charter announced the launch of a high-end corporate travel search engine. Last month saw the launch of the world’s largest legal search engine, the Public Library of Law.

Google Webmaster Central and the Google Search Quality team have a new ally in the global fight against Web spam, cloaking, paid links, link farms and other non-sanctioned schemes: the Security Group at the University of Cambridge.

Web sites created by Chicago-based Privila were banned by Google earlier this month after Steven Murdoch of University of Cambridge Computer Labs exposed an alleged cloaking scheme by the content network. Steven Murdoch blogged about his findings on March 6th. Two days later Google removed the sites from its index.

It seems that people and spiders were seeing different pages when they visited sites such as soccerlove.com, ammancarpets.com, and canadianbattery.com. People were seeing display ads created by unpaid interns. Google spiders were seeing keyword-rich articles also churned out by unpaid interns. Windows Live and Yahoo! were seeing neither ads nor articles.

Privila already has added the articles back to the sites but the sites are not yet re-indexed.

Murdoch discovered the cloaking after the computer lab where he works received a link exchange spam email from Privila.

Microsoft researchers teamed up with University of California, Davis researchers to pinpoint exactly where "the bottleneck" of Web spam occurs and how legitimate advertisers inadvertently end up in bad neighborhoods. The majority of spam, they found out, comes from the same few places, and the middlemen are some names you might recognize.
The study (PDF [...]