AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web) is workshop on IR in the world of Web Spam. From the call for papers page:
Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering, indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from collections wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously. On the Web, the predominant form of such manipulation is “search engine spamming” or spamdexing, i.e., malicious attempts to influence the outcome of ranking algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high ranking for some items in the collection. There is an economic incentive to rank higher in search engines, considering that a good ranking on them is strongly correlated with more traffic, which often translates to more revenue.
The list of papers to be presented is released and there are some very interesting ones. Search Engine Land has posted a nice listing.
One Comment
I think with Google’s recent move to include real time listings (twitter) in search results will lead to much more manuipulative ways of spamming. Brand protection will become a lot more difficult.