Algorithms For Dummies

 

»

Cloaking: Defines a more sophisticated variant of invisible text where, instead 

of text, scripts or images provide different content to search engine spiders 

than users actually see.

Web spammers use such tricks to trick search engines to rank pages highly, even 

though the page content is poor and, at best, misleading. These tricks have 

 

consequences. For instance, a user might look for information relating to 

 university research and instead be exposed to commercial advertising or inappro-

priate content. Users became disappointed because they often ended up at pages 

unrelated to their needs, requiring them to restate their queries and to spend time 

digging for useful information among pages of results, wasting energy in distin-

guishing good references from bad ones. Scholars and experts, noting the need to 

cope with spam results and fearing that the development of the web could halt 

because users had difficulties finding what they really wanted, started working on 

possible solutions.

As Brin and Page worked on their solving algorithm, other ideas were drafted and 

publicized, or developed in parallel. One such idea is Hyper Search, by Massimo 

Marchiori, who first pointed out the importance of web links in determining the 

prominence of a web page as a factor to consider during a search: 

https://www. 

w3.org/People/Massimo/papers/WWW6/

). Another interesting solution is a web 

search engine project called HITS (Hypertext-Induced Topic Search), also based 

on the web links structure and developed by Jon Kleinberg, a young scientist 

working at IBM Almaden in Silicon Valley. The interesting fact about HITS is that 

it classifies pages into hubs (a page with many links to authoritative pages) and 

authorities (pages considered authoritative by many links from hubs), something 

that PageRank doesn’t do explicitly (but implicitly does in computations) 

(

http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/Winter2009/RalucaRemus/Lecture4/ 

lecture4.html

).

---

212