CIS Department Talk - October 3, 2006

The Department of Computer and Information Science & The Society of Computer Science Present

Speaker:	Dr. Brian Davison, Lehigh University
Topic:	Search Engine Spam: Significance and Some Proposed Solutions
Date:	Tuesday October 3, 2006; 5:30pm
Place:	John Mulcahy Hall, Room 403

The ever growing popularity of web search has created a strong financial incentive for content providers to have their web pages ranked highly for popular queries. As a result, search engine marketers are keen to understand how popular search engines function so that they can manipulate the results. The creation of special content or links on the web to inappropriately raise a page's ranking is called search engine spam. Recognizing and dealing with such spam constitutes one of the greatest difficulties in building a quality search engine today. In this talk I will briefly describe various types of search engine spam and the significance of such spam to users and search engine providers. Most of the talk, however, will focus on our recent work in recognizing various kinds of search engine spam, including link farms and cloaking.

Brian Davison is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University and teaches courses on web search engines, networking, system administration, and C and UNIX programming. He heads the Web Understanding, Modeling, and Evaluation (WUME) laboratory. Dr. Davison earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Bucknell University and has an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University. As a graduate student, he led development in the Rutgers DiscoWeb search engine project which was later spun out as an internet startup called Teoma (and was subsequently purchased by Ask Jeeves). He continues to do research in this area, focusing on the integration of text and link analysis applied to search and classification problems on the Web. Dr. Davison's interests additionally include information retrieval, data mining, network infrastructure for the WWW, and the analysis of trust and authority in information networks. He is a 2006 NSF Faculty Early CAREER award winner and one of twelve Microsoft Live Labs "Accelerating Search" award recipients. Dr. Davison's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Microsoft Research.