Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

The ubiquitous use of search engines to discover and access internet content shows clearly the success of information retrieval algorithms. However, unlike controlled collections, the vast majority of the Web pages lack an authority asserting their quality. This openness of the Web has been the key to its rapid growth and success, but this openness is also a major source of new adversarial challenges for information retrieval methods.

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 third AIRWeb workshop in Banff, Canada as part of WWW2007 builds on the previous successful meetings at Chiba, Japan as part of WWW2005, and at Seattle, USA as part of SIGIR2006. The papers in this workshop proceedings provide a combination of mature and early-stage work in web-based adversarial IR.

Full contents of the proceedings are available from the ACM digital library. Papers from the workshop are also available from the AIRWeb 2007 web page (plus slides!) and WWW2007 web site.

Reference: Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla and Brian D. Davison (eds), Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 215. ACM Press, May 2007.

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