Incorporating Trust into Web Search

The Web today includes many pages intended to deceive search engines, in which content or links are created to attain an unwarranted result ranking. Since the links among web pages are used to calculate authority, ranking systems should take into consideration which pages contain content to be trusted and which do not. In this paper, we assume the existence of a mechanism, such as, but not limited to Gyongyi et al.'s TrustRank, to estimate the trustworthiness of a given page.

However, unlike existing work that uses trust to identify or demote spam pages, we propose how to incorporate a given trust estimate into the process of calculating authority for a cautious surfer. We apply a total of forty-five queries over two large, real-world datasets to demonstrate that incorporating trust into an authority calculation using our cautious surfer can improve PageRank's precision at 10 by 11-26% and average top-10 result quality by 53-81%.

Technical Report LU-CSE-07-002, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, January 2007. This report supersedes LU-CSE-06-034.

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