Analyzing and Influencing Search Engine Results: Business and Technology Impacts on Web Information Retrieval

Search engines are indexing several billions of webpages and thus enable an - tremely quick access to all sorts of contents of the Web. Most of these requests consistofoneword. Asresult, severalthousandsofdocumentsaredeliveredwhere the ?rst documents are not necessarily the needed ones. Where the speci?cation of the query depends on the searcher’s knowledge, the order of listed results - pends on the search engine used. Knowing the search engines leads to a better understanding of results and helps developing speci?c Web-based sales strategies. The present work “Analyzing and In?uencing Search Engine Results” picks up an up-to-date topic due to the fact that search engines have become an important in?uence factor in economy and society. The author presents a comprehensive overview of recent Web-search techn- ogy. He describes the related problems from a search engine’s as well as from the user’s perspective. Driven by the users’ needs, new approaches for searching the Web are developed, implemented and tested. Readers of this work will become familiar with the precautions that have to be taken for reaching upper result page positions. Different strategies are explained including spamming techniques that are used to in?uence the results of ranking methods. Following the principle of business informatics, the author explores the topic from a business and a technology view. He complements the scienti?c view by approaches for practical problems and gives concrete instructions for practitioners.