Adversarial information retrieval on the web (AIRWeb 2006)

The attraction of hundreds of millions of web searches per day provides significant incentive for many content providers to do whatever is necessary to rank highly in search engine results, while search engine providers want to provide the most accurate results. The conflicting goals of search and content providers are adversarial, and the use of techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called search engine spam. Such methods typically include textual as well as link-based techniques, or their combination.