Manipulating the PageRank algorithm
The article is discussing the history of the PageRank algorithm that Google uses to index its search results. It then starts describing “Google-bombing” which is a term that the article uses to describe the act of intentionally creating links on the internet in order to bias the results of the PageRank algorithm. It describes a couple notable cases such as “More evil than satan himself” being a google-bombed term that lead to the Microsoft homepage.
The article mentions that in 2007 Google made a concerted effort to get rid of the “Google-bombing” flaw in the PageRank algorithm after it realized the political and commercial consequences. The change to the algorithm is not described in this article although it does mention the possibility of using human labeling for irrelevant search results. This could be used in a machine learning algorithm addition to PageRank.
The article discusses the PageRank algorithm and link analysis which relates directly to course material. It also discusses the problems with a purely link analysis based algorithm which is also mentioned in class. The article gave some more real world examples of the flaws with just PageRank using link analysis and was very interesting to read in the context of INFO 2040.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2bce/4885f4d27923acc283af760027cec94ccbdf.pdf