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Call for Papers: Special issue on Adversarial Issues in Web Search
ACM Transactions on the Web (http://www.acm.org/tweb/)
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We are soliciting papers for a special issue of the ACM Transactions
on the Web (ACM TWEB) devoted to adversarial issues in web search.

Over the past decade, web search engines have become the predominant
tool for web users to locate information, and they have grown to be
cornerstones of the web economy, by driving traffic to commercial web
sites and by creating web advertising platforms. The economic potential
of search engines has given rise to adversaries that are trying to profit
from search engines either by influencing search results or by redirecting
advertisement revenue streams.

The attraction of hundreds of millions of web searches per day provides
significant incentive for many content providers to do whatever is
necessary to rank highly in search engine results, while search engine
providers want to provide the most accurate results. The conflicting
goals of search and content providers is adversarial, and the use of
techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called
search engine spam. Such methods typically include textual as well as
link-based techniques, or their combination.

Search engines also face another form of adversarial behavior
colloquially known as click fraud. Most of the major search engines
use an advertisement-based revenue model, where they present users
with advertisements tailored to their queries. When a user clicks on
an advertisement, the search engines collects a fee from the advertiser.
This opens the doors for adversarial players to deplete the funds of a
competitor by generating a fraudulent click stream to the competitor's
advertisements. A variant of this scheme exploits the fact that the
major search engines operate advertisement networks, where they display
advertisements on partner web sites and share ad revenue with these
partners. A dishonest partner can profit illegitimately by generating a
click stream to ads displayed on his site. This is straightforward to
detect if the clicks originate from a single computer, but much harder
to detect if the attack is distributed (e.g. via a "zombie farm" of
co-opted computers).

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

- search engine spam and optimization,
- comment spam, referrer spam,
- blog spam (splogs),
- cloaking,
- crawling the web without detection,
- link-bombing (a.k.a. Google-bombing),
- malicious tagging,
- reverse engineering of ranking algorithms, and
- click fraud.

Papers addressing higher-level concerns (e.g., whether 'open' algorithms
can succeed in an adversarial environment, whether permanent solutions
are possible, etc.) are also welcome.

Content and formatting guidelines as well as information on the ACM TWEB
review process can be found online at http://www.acm.org/tweb/author.html.
When submitting your paper, please mention that it is to be considered for the
special issue on Adversarial Issues in Web Search.

IMPORTANT DATES

30 March 2007 Deadline for submissions
18 June 2007 Notification of acceptance
31 August 2007 Deadline for revisions (if needed)
28 September 2007 Camera-ready copy due
4th quarter 2007 Publication of special issue

GUEST EDITORS

Tim Converse, Yahoo! Search
Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University
Marc Najork, Microsoft Research