SPEAKER: Michelle Goodstein 

TIME: Wednesday 12-1pm, March 7, 2007

PLACE: NSH 1507

TITLE: A Two Player Game to Combat Web Spam

ABSTRACT:
We present a novel approach to combating web spam. In the spirit of Luis
von Ahn''s games with a purpose, we propose using a two player game to
identify spam pages within search results. We loosely define web spam as
those pages that are ranked higher than their relevance merits. Our game
asks users to classify a page as either highly relevant to a query or not
relevant to a query, with the option of passing. We use data from the game
as the input to a simple voting algorithm which determines whether a page
should be removed from the ranking. We show that the best strategy for
users playing the game for fun is to answer truthfully, and that
adversarial players have difficulty obstructing the game. We aim to
provide a service which functions in addition to automated web spam
detection techniques and can help correct errors within a ranking by
removing those pages that users find irrelevant.

Joint work with Virginia Vassilevska.