Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust

Web spamming, the practice of introducing artificial text and links into web pages to affect the results of searches, has been recognized as a major problem for search engines. 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. In society, recognition of an untrustworthy message (in the opinion of a particular person or other social entity) is a reason...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: AIRWEB
• Authors: Panagiotis Takis Metaxas, Joseph DeStefano
• Keywords: AIRWEB 2005, Internet Technology, Major Problem, Search Engines, Untrustworthy Messages