The usefulness of web spam

Timothy Jones*, Paul Thomas, David Hawking, Ramesh Sankaranarayana

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    Spam comprises at least 60% of the public web, and search engine companies invest considerable effort in rejecting these apparently useless pages. But how bad are spam pages in search results? Can spam be dealt with as a side-effect of dealing with page utility, or is the relationship more complex? Thirty-four volunteer judges rated selected individual documents first on usefulness to a specified task and then on degree of "spamminess". Our results show that the relationship between spamminess and utility is far from clear cut; judges found that an important proportion of spam documents were useful. We conclude that evaluation should consider both utility and spamminess, as separate factors; and that search engines should not summarily discard spam pages but should take their utility into account as well.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationADCS 2011 - Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium
    Pages1-5
    Number of pages5
    Publication statusPublished - 2011
    Event16th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, ADCS 2011 - Canberra, ACT, Australia
    Duration: 2 Dec 20112 Dec 2011

    Publication series

    NameADCS 2011 - Proceedings of the Sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium

    Conference

    Conference16th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, ADCS 2011
    Country/TerritoryAustralia
    CityCanberra, ACT
    Period2/12/112/12/11

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