Abstract. The page rank of a commercial web site has an enormous economic impact because it directly influences the number of potential customers that find the site as a highly ranked search engine result. Link spamming – inflating the page rank of a target page by artificially creating many referring pages – has therefore become a common practice. In order to maintain the quality of their search results, search engine providers try to oppose efforts that decorrelate page rank and relevance and maintain blacklists of spamming pages while spammers, at the same time, try to camouflage their spam pages. We formulate the problem of identifying link spam and discuss a methodology for generating training data. Experiments reveal the effectiveness of classes of intrinsic and relational attributes and shed light on the robustness of classifiers against obfuscation of attributes by an adversarial spammer. We identify open research problems related to web spam. 1

Signature based anti-virus technologies are widely used to fight computer viruses. It is difficult to evaluate such systems because they work in the wild and few companies would be willing to turn them off to be part of a control group! This paper presents a new model of these technologies that can be used to predict and evaluate their effectiveness.

This article characterizes video-based interactions that emerge from YouTube’s video response feature, which allows users to discuss themes and to provide reviews for products or places using much richer media than text. Based on crawled data covering a representative subset of videos and users, we present a characterization from two perspectives: the video response view and the interaction network view. In addition to providing valuable statistical models for various characteristics, our study uncovers typical user behavioral patterns in video-based environments and shows evidence of opportunistic behavior.