Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust

@inproceedings{citeulike:336503, abstract = {Web spamming, the practice of introducing artificial text and links into web pages to affect the results of searches, has been recognized as a ma jor problem for search engin es. It is also a serious problem for users because they are not aware of it and they tend to confuse trusting the search engine with trusting the results of a search. In this paper, we first analyze the influence that web spam has on the evolution of the search engines and we identify the strong relationship of spamming methods to propagandistic techniques in society. Our analysis provides a foundation to understanding why spamming works and offers new insight on how to address it. In particular, it suggest that one could use anti-propagandistic techniques in the web to recognize spam. The second part of the paper demonstrates such a technique, called backwards propagation of distrust. I n society, recognition of an untrustworthy message (in the opinion of a particular person or other social entity) is a reason for questioning the entities that recommend the message. Entities that are found to strongly support untrustworthy messages become untrustworthy themselves. So, social distrust is propagated backwards for a number of steps . Our algorithm simulates this social behavior on the web graph. In our algorithm, starting from an untrustworthy (according to the end user) site s, we examine its trust nei ghborhood, that is, the neighborhood of sites that link to s in a few steps. Evaluating the sites-members of the neighborhood we identify a biconnected component (BCCs) with a high percentage of untrustworthy sites. BCCs are formed when there are multiple paths to reach s, thus indicating a concerted effort to promote s. This is not the case when starting from a trustworthy site. Our tool explores thousands of nodes within minutes and could be deployed at the browser-level, making it possible to resolve the moral que stion of who should be making the decision of weeding out spammers in favor of the end user. Our approach can lead to browser-level web spam filters that work in synergy with the powerful search engines to deliver personalized, trusted web results.}, author = {Metaxas, Panagiotis T. and Destefano, Joseph }, booktitle = {Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web}, citeulike-article-id = {336503}, keywords = {link-spam, web-graph}, month = {May}, posted-at = {2005-09-30 11:48:36}, priority = {0}, title = {Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust}, year = {2005} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:336503 L3 - citeulike-article-id:336503 N2 - Web spamming, the practice of introducing artificial text and links into web pages to affect the results of searches, has been recognized as a ma jor problem for search engin es. It is also a serious problem for users because they are not aware of it and they tend to confuse trusting the search engine with trusting the results of a search. In this paper, we first analyze the influence that web spam has on the evolution of the search engines and we identify the strong relationship of spamming methods to propagandistic techniques in society. Our analysis provides a foundation to understanding why spamming works and offers new insight on how to address it. In particular, it suggest that one could use anti-propagandistic techniques in the web to recognize spam. The second part of the paper demonstrates such a technique, called backwards propagation of distrust. I n society, recognition of an untrustworthy message (in the opinion of a particular person or other social entity) is a reason for questioning the entities that recommend the message. Entities that are found to strongly support untrustworthy messages become untrustworthy themselves. So, social distrust is propagated backwards for a number of steps . Our algorithm simulates this social behavior on the web graph. In our algorithm, starting from an untrustworthy (according to the end user) site s, we examine its trust nei ghborhood, that is, the neighborhood of sites that link to s in a few steps. Evaluating the sites-members of the neighborhood we identify a biconnected component (BCCs) with a high percentage of untrustworthy sites. BCCs are formed when there are multiple paths to reach s, thus indicating a concerted effort to promote s. This is not the case when starting from a trustworthy site. Our tool explores thousands of nodes within minutes and could be deployed at the browser-level, making it possible to resolve the moral que stion of who should be making the decision of weeding out spammers in favor of the end user. Our approach can lead to browser-level web spam filters that work in synergy with the powerful search engines to deliver personalized, trusted web results. TI - Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust T2 - Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web KW - link-spam KW - web-graph AU - Metaxas, Panagiotis AU - Destefano, Joseph PY - 2005/05// ER -