Detection of Fake News on COVID-19 on Web Search Engines

In early January 2020, after China reported the first cases of the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) in the city of Wuhan, unreliable and not fully accurate information has started spreading faster than the virus itself. Alongside this pandemic, people have experienced a parallel infodemic, i.e., an overabundance of information, some of which is misleading or even harmful, which has widely spread around the globe. Although social media are increasingly being used as the information source, web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!, still represent a powerful and trustworthy resource for finding information on the Web. This is due to their capability to capture the largest amount of information, helping users quickly identify the most relevant, useful, although not always the most reliable, results for their search queries. This study aims to detect potential misleading and fake contents by capturing and analysing textual information, which flow through search engines. By using a real-world dataset associated with recent COVID-19 pandemic, we first apply re-sampling techniques for class imbalance, and then we use existing machine learning algorithms for classification of not reliable news. By extracting lexical and host-based features of associated uniform resource locators (URLs) for news articles, we show that the proposed methods, so common in phishing and malicious URL detection, can improve the efficiency and performance of classifiers. Based on these findings, we suggest that the use of both textual and URL features can improve the effectiveness of fake news detection methods.

Eye-Tracking Studies of Web Search Engines: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper analyzes peer-reviewed empirical eye-tracking studies of behavior in web search engines. A framework is created to examine the effectiveness of eye-tracking by drawing on the results of, and discussions concerning previous experiments. Based on a review of 56 papers on eye-tracking for search engines from 2004 to 2019, a 12-element matrix for coding procedure is proposed. Content analysis shows that this matrix contains 12 common parts: search engine; apparatus; participants; interface; results; measures; scenario; tasks; language; presentation, research questions; and findings. The literature review covers results, the contexts of web searches, a description of participants in eye-tracking studies, and the types of studies performed on the search engines. The paper examines the state of current research on the topic and points out gaps in the existing literature. The review indicates that behavior on search engines has changed over the years. Search engines’ interfaces have been improved by adding many new functions and users have moved from desktop searches to mobile searches. The findings of this review provide avenues for further studies as well as for the design of search engines.

Location Based Business Recommendation Using Spatial Demand

Business locations is most important factor to consider before starting a business because the best location attracts more number of people. With the help of web search engines, the customers can search the nearest business location before visiting the business. For example, if a customer need to buy some jewel, he makes use of search engines to find the nearest jewellery shop. If some entrepreneur wants to start a new jewellery shop, he needs to find a best area where there is no jewellery shop nearby and there are more customers in need of jewel. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to find the best place to start a business where there is high demand and no (or very few supply). We measure the quality of recommendation in terms of average service time, customer-business ratio of our new algorithm by implementing in benchmark datasets and the results prove that our algorithm is more efficient than the existing kNN algorithm.

Context-Aware Personalized Web Search Using Navigation History

It is highly desirable that web search engines know users well and provide just what the user needs. Although great effort has been devoted to achieve this dream, the commonly used web search engines still provide a “one-fit-all” results. One of the barriers is lack of an accurate representation of user search context that supports personalised web search. This article presents a method to represent user search context and incorporate this representation to produce personalised web search results based on Google search results. The key contributions are twofold: a method to build contextual user profiles using their browsing behaviour and the semantic knowledge represented in a domain ontology; and an algorithm to re-rank the original search results using these contextual user profiles. The effectiveness of proposed new techniques were evaluated through comparisons of cases with and without these techniques respectively and a promising result of 35% precision improvement is achieved.