Of course they would like you to believe they will, but the whole reason spam is effective is because there are logical and legitimate reasons to use the same techniques "spammers" are using.

If they did have such incredible results that spam was not effective then spam would change to find an effective way.

The advancement of spam is an issue of economics. The reason link brokering has recently became huge is in spite of it's great costs it has recently became more effective and economic than many other types of spam.

Good luck MicroSoft...
Article... and my opinions of it below

The company unveiled a research project at its Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View which uses statistical analysis to locate spam web pages.

I thought all search engines did this?

A spam web page is designed solely to fool search engines by linking keywords to web pages that the spammer wants to show up high in the search results.

There are many indirect types of spam too...

In a sample of one billion web pages, Microsoft claims that eight per cent are spam.

Sounds a bit low...

In one case, the Microsoft researchers claim to have found a webpage in Germany that would constantly create pages filled with pieces of text that were copied from random web pages, linked to a porn site.

This not only leads visitors away from the webpage from which the text was copied, but gives the spammer an indefinite source of keywords and key phrases to link to.

The researchers found the site after their analysis identified that German web pages on average were updated more often than those in other geographies.

Predictable Germans... actually why would MSN point out the location of the site?