Bruno Tuffin and Patrick Maillé - Evaluating search engines and defining a consensus implementation

14:00
Mercredi
13
Nov
2019
Organisé par : 
Philippe Mulhem
Intervenant : 
Bruno Tuffin (Dyonysos research team at INRIA Rennes) & Patrick Maillé (IMT Atlantique Pays de Loire, Mines-Télécom)
Équipes : 
Bruno Tuffin and Patrick Maillé au LIG

 

Wednesday 13 november 2019, Bruno Tuffin from the Dyonysos research team at INRIA Rennes and Patrick Maillé from the IMT Atlantique Pays de Loire (Mines-Télécom) are visiting the LIG.

Their research focus, among others, on the neutrality of internet and on the biases of web search engines.

Different search engines provide different outputs for the same keyword. This may be due to different definitions of relevance, and/or to different knowledge/anticipation of users' preferences, but rankings are also suspected to be biased towards own content, which may prejudicial to other content providers. We make some initial steps toward a rigorous comparison and analysis of search engines, by proposing a definition for a consensual relevance of a page with respect to a keyword, from a set of search engines. More specifically, we look at the results of several search engines for a sample of keywords, and define for each keyword the visibility of a page based on its ranking over all search engines. This allows to define a score of the search engine for a keyword, and then its average score over all keywords. Based on the pages visibility, we can also define the consensus search engine as the one showing the most visible results for each keyword. We have implemented this model and present an analysis of the results.