Nullification test collections for web spam and SEO

Abstract

Research in the area of adversarial information retrieval has been facilitated by the availability of the UK-2006/UK-2007 collections, comprising crawl data, link graph, and spam labels. However, research into nullifying the negative effect of spam or excessive search engine optimisation (SEO) on the ranking of non-spam pages is not well supported by these resources. Nor is the study of cloaking techniques or of click spam. Finally, the domain-restricted nature of a .uk crawl means that only parts of link-farm icebergs may be visible in these crawls. We introduce the term nullification which we define as "preventing problem pages from negatively affecting search results". We show some important differences between properties of current .uk-restricted crawls and those previously reported for the Web as a whole. We identify a need for an adversarial IR collection which is not domain-restricted and which is supported by a set of appropriate query sets and (optimistically) user-behaviour data. The billion-page unrestricted crawl being conducted by CMU (web09-bst) and which will be used in the 2009 TREC Web Track is assessed as a possible basis for a new AIR test collection. We discuss the pros and cons of its scale, and the feasibility of adding resources such as query lists to enhance the utility of the collection for AIR research.