For last year’s WWW conference in Japan, Brian Davison put together a nice one-day workshop on adversarial informational information retrieval (aka search-engine spam, and related problems).
This year Marc Najork (Microsoft Research) and I are joining Brian on the organizing committee, and the workshop will be attached to SIGIR 2006, in Seattle in August. Deadlines are tight, unfortunately – we’re looking for papers by April 28.
More detail on the workshop site itself, but here are some areas of interest:
o search engine spam and optimization,
o crawling the web without detection,
o link-bombing (a.k.a. Google-bombing),
o comment spam, referrer spam,
o blog spam (splogs),
o malicious tagging,
o reverse engineering of ranking algorithms,
o advertisement blocking, and
o web content filtering.
and the program committee:
Sibel Adali, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Lada Adamic, University of Michigan, USA
Einat Amitay, IBM Research Haifa, Israel
Andrei Broder, Yahoo! Research, USA
Carlos Castillo, Universita di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy
Abdur Chowdhury, AOL Search, USA
Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
Matt Cutts, Google, USA
Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research, USA
Zoltan Gyongyi, Stanford University, USA
Matthew Hurst, BuzzMetrics, USA
Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research, USA
Jan Pedersen, Yahoo!, USA
Bernhard Seefeld, Switzerland
Erik Selberg, Microsoft Search, USA
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research, USA
Tao Yang, Ask Jeeves/Univ. of California-Santa Barbara, USA
Tim Converse 