Adversarial Web Search

Web search engines have become indispensable tools for finding content. As the popularity of the Web has increased, the efforts to exploit the Web for commercial, social, or political advantage have grown, making it harder for search engines to discriminate between truthful signals of content quality and deceptive attempts to game search engines’ rankings. This problem is further complicated by the open nature of the Web, which allows anyone to write and publish anything, and by the fact that search engines must analyze ever-growing numbers of Web pages. Moreover, increasing expectations of users, who over time rely on Web search for information needs related to more aspects of their lives, further deepen the need for search engines to develop effective counter-measures against deception.

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