In addition to general controls–e.g., turning on overall moderation, determining the number of links that can get in without moderation–there are two panels in which words can be entered.

The upper panel, Comment Moderation, will force any comment containing those words or word portions–anywhere in the message or header–into moderation. I’m using it to prevent one particular poster from posting directly.

The lower panel, Comment Blacklist, is prepopulated with a bunch of spamment words (medication names, for example). You can add words that will cause comments to be blocked entirely–with caution, since partial words can match and you won’t even know that comments have been blocked.

I don’t currently use any spam plugin; WordPress’ regular controls have been good enough to date. (As with spam in work mail, which is now 99% blocked by Postini, spammers seem to come in waves–when nothing works, the attempts decline for a while.) I’d been thinking about adding a Capcha-like utility, but actually would prefer not to add such a bar. (Not as bad as requiring site registration, to be sure.)

Seth: Oddly, while the overall results number is misleading as all get out (which I already knew), the set of displayed results is, I believe, misleadingly low. I think Google’s definition of “similarity” is too inclusive in some cases. But the numbers problem is similar across the board, with the possible exceptions AskJeeves/Teoma (which look to be plausible in my “ego searches”) and Alexa’s Google-derived numbers (which appear to be too low). MSN’s numbers are a whole lot lower than Yahoogle! and may or may not be more plausible.

It’s useful to be reminded, as you keep reminding people, that using any Yagooms numbers greater than 1,000 as being significant of much of anything is misuse of “statistics.” Basically, it’s a more refined version of the old “one, two, many” counting scheme: one to 999 and Many.