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Inside search engines' war on bad results
TECHNOLOGY Insight Improving searches
Oleksiy Maksymenko/Superstock
Merge your fingerprints to protect your data
Search and you will find Search engines have improved without you noticing. How did they do it? ANYONE can publish on the web, but it freelance writers, though the firm would be better if some people didn’t; declined to comment. And Santa the world does not need another site Monica-based Demand Media has that provides advice on how to unlock seen its stock price fall by over 50 per an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. cent since it went public earlier this Now new evidence shows that search year for $1.5 billion. engines have upped their game to Most of the credit for such changes make sure their results are not has been given to Google, which this dominated by such low-quality sites. February announced that it had Search engines are meant to pick updated its search algorithm in a bid out high-quality sites amid the sea to prioritise sites that publish original of knock-offs, but even they get and well-researched material. It won’t overwhelmed. As recently as March, provide details, but many site owners for example, the first 10 results from noticed that the update detected and a Google search for “how to organise “In March, 9 of 10 top search your desktop” contained nine links results for ‘how to organise to pages churned out by “content your desktop’ were made farms” – websites that publish reams by content farms” of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars. penalised sites that publish multiple That prompted New Scientist to ask near-identical articles, a favourite computer scientist Richard McCreadie tactic of content farms. For example, at the University of Glasgow, UK, to the traffic flowing from search engines look into the issue. The results show to eHow, a Demand Media site, that Google and Microsoft have won a dropped 20 per cent after the update. major victory in the fight against such Google has also enlisted users to keep content farms. In the process they may up the fight – it says that it now have inflicted serious pain on two demotes sites that people choose organisations often cited as providers to exclude from search results. of content farm material: Seed, a To test how successful Google and project from AOL, appears to have Microsoft’s Bing have been at fending stopped commissioning content from off content-farmed results, McCreadie 22 | NewScientist | 17 December 2011
ran 50 search queries known to be a target of content farmers, such as “how to train for a marathon”, in March and August this year. Then he paid people to examine the results for links to low-quality sites, where “low quality” was defined as uninformative sites whose primary function appears to be displaying adverts. The results are striking. In the case of the marathon query, sites that contained lists of generic tips, such as “invest in a good pair of running shoes”, were present in the top 10 in March but had disappeared by August, while high-quality sources, such as Runner’s World magazine, now appear near the top. Similar trends were found throughout the 50 queries. The story is far from over. Search engines play such a prominent role in our lives – Google alone handles over a billion queries a day – that companies constantly vie for the top places in the results. Sites can rank highly by producing authoritative material, but this is expensive, so there will always be those looking for a cheap short cut. Content farms may be out for now, but with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it’s just a matter of time before the next battle commences. Jim Giles Additional reporting by Ferris Jabr n
HAVING your password hacked is a hassle, but it is not the end of the world – after all, you can just set a new one. That’s not the case with fingerprint authentication: if someone copies your digits, you’re done for. Now a technique for blending two fingerprints to create a third could provide a solution. The software works by splitting a fingerprint into two components. The first corresponds to the general pattern of ridges and the second describes the fingerprint minutiae – the distinctive features used to compare prints, such as the point at which two ridges merge. Combining one component from each print creates a new and unique print that can be used for authentication. “This is beneficial from a privacy perspective,” says Arun Ross, a computer scientist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, who developed the technique with his colleague Asem Othman. “The original fingerprint images are not stored; rather only the mixed fingerprint is stored and used for matching.” Some existing authentication systems store fingerprints using a hash function, a type of nonreversible encryption from which the original fingerprints cannot be recovered. If these systems are compromised then the owner can simply use a new hash to restore security. Ross’s technique would mean users also had the power to change the stored fingerprints, giving them total control over their data. The technique could also be used to combine fingerprints from two individuals, allowing it to work in systems that require authentication from more than one person. Ross presented the research at the Workshop on Information Forensics and Security in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, earlier this month. Jacob Aron n
Oleksiy Maksymenko/Superstock
Merge your fingerprints to protect your data
Search and you will find Search engines have improved without you noticing. How did they do it? ANYONE can publish on the web, but it freelance writers, though the firm would be better if some people didn’t; declined to comment. And Santa the world does not need another site Monica-based Demand Media has that provides advice on how to unlock seen its stock price fall by over 50 per an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. cent since it went public earlier this Now new evidence shows that search year for $1.5 billion. engines have upped their game to Most of the credit for such changes make sure their results are not has been given to Google, which this dominated by such low-quality sites. February announced that it had Search engines are meant to pick updated its search algorithm in a bid out high-quality sites amid the sea to prioritise sites that publish original of knock-offs, but even they get and well-researched material. It won’t overwhelmed. As recently as March, provide details, but many site owners for example, the first 10 results from noticed that the update detected and a Google search for “how to organise “In March, 9 of 10 top search your desktop” contained nine links results for ‘how to organise to pages churned out by “content your desktop’ were made farms” – websites that publish reams by content farms” of articles, often of dubious quality, that aim simply to attract clicks and advertising dollars. penalised sites that publish multiple That prompted New Scientist to ask near-identical articles, a favourite computer scientist Richard McCreadie tactic of content farms. For example, at the University of Glasgow, UK, to the traffic flowing from search engines look into the issue. The results show to eHow, a Demand Media site, that Google and Microsoft have won a dropped 20 per cent after the update. major victory in the fight against such Google has also enlisted users to keep content farms. In the process they may up the fight – it says that it now have inflicted serious pain on two demotes sites that people choose organisations often cited as providers to exclude from search results. of content farm material: Seed, a To test how successful Google and project from AOL, appears to have Microsoft’s Bing have been at fending stopped commissioning content from off content-farmed results, McCreadie 22 | NewScientist | 17 December 2011
ran 50 search queries known to be a target of content farmers, such as “how to train for a marathon”, in March and August this year. Then he paid people to examine the results for links to low-quality sites, where “low quality” was defined as uninformative sites whose primary function appears to be displaying adverts. The results are striking. In the case of the marathon query, sites that contained lists of generic tips, such as “invest in a good pair of running shoes”, were present in the top 10 in March but had disappeared by August, while high-quality sources, such as Runner’s World magazine, now appear near the top. Similar trends were found throughout the 50 queries. The story is far from over. Search engines play such a prominent role in our lives – Google alone handles over a billion queries a day – that companies constantly vie for the top places in the results. Sites can rank highly by producing authoritative material, but this is expensive, so there will always be those looking for a cheap short cut. Content farms may be out for now, but with billions of dollars hanging in the balance, it’s just a matter of time before the next battle commences. Jim Giles Additional reporting by Ferris Jabr n
HAVING your password hacked is a hassle, but it is not the end of the world – after all, you can just set a new one. That’s not the case with fingerprint authentication: if someone copies your digits, you’re done for. Now a technique for blending two fingerprints to create a third could provide a solution. The software works by splitting a fingerprint into two components. The first corresponds to the general pattern of ridges and the second describes the fingerprint minutiae – the distinctive features used to compare prints, such as the point at which two ridges merge. Combining one component from each print creates a new and unique print that can be used for authentication. “This is beneficial from a privacy perspective,” says Arun Ross, a computer scientist at West Virginia University in Morgantown, who developed the technique with his colleague Asem Othman. “The original fingerprint images are not stored; rather only the mixed fingerprint is stored and used for matching.” Some existing authentication systems store fingerprints using a hash function, a type of nonreversible encryption from which the original fingerprints cannot be recovered. If these systems are compromised then the owner can simply use a new hash to restore security. Ross’s technique would mean users also had the power to change the stored fingerprints, giving them total control over their data. The technique could also be used to combine fingerprints from two individuals, allowing it to work in systems that require authentication from more than one person. Ross presented the research at the Workshop on Information Forensics and Security in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, earlier this month. Jacob Aron n