Fighting against web spam: a novel propagation method based on click-through data

  • Authors:

  • Chao Wei;Yiqun Liu;Min Zhang;Shaoping Ma;Liyun Ru;Kuo Zhang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Sogou Inc., Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '12 Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Combating Web spam is one of the greatest challenges for Web search engines. State-of-the-art anti-spam techniques focus mainly on detecting varieties of spam strategies, such as content spamming and link-based spamming. Although these anti-spam approaches have had much success, they encounter problems when fighting against a continuous barrage of new types of spamming techniques. We attempt to solve the problem from a new perspective, by noticing that queries that are more likely to lead to spam pages/sites have the following characteristics: 1) they are popular or reflect heavy demands for search engine users and 2) there are usually few key resources or authoritative results for them. From these observations, we propose a novel method that is based on click-through data analysis by propagating the spamicity score iteratively between queries and URLs from a few seed pages/sites. Once we obtain the seed pages/sites, we use the link structure of the click-through bipartite graph to discover other pages/sites that are likely to be spam. Experiments show that our algorithm is both efficient and effective in detecting Web spam. Moreover, combining our method with some popular anti-spam techniques such as TrustRank achieves improvement compared with each technique taken individually.