Security of World Wide Web search engines

As all the recent market surveys witness, the World Wide Web (WWW) is expanding at a phenomenal rate, both in the number of users and in the amount of available information. This has made the World Wide Web one of the key fields for companies advertisement. On the other hand, advertisement on the web depends crucially on its visibility, i.e. on the possibility to be noticed by as many users as possible. The backbone of information management in the WWW is given by search engines, that allow users to access the enormous amount of information present in the web. Hence, advertisement has identified search engines as the major strategic component in web advertisement: it is essential for a company to appear on top tens of search engines, when the user asks for a product in their market field. Just by their automatic nature, search engines can be fooled by artificially manipulating web pages, so to make them rank higher: this relatively new phenomenon (called sep, after search engine persuasion) has now become so widespread to be a great problem: Indeed, on the one hand it provokes a great loss in advertisement profits for search engines maintainers, which are unwillingly giving free advertisement to companies that are sepping; on the other hand, it makes searching in the web extremely more difficult for users, since the performances of search engines are heavily affected by the artificial sep manipulation, making their evaluation mechanisms going wrong. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the problem of security of search engines, giving a complete panoramic, and proposing various levels of security for search engines; Practically, we propose implementations of such security shields, that can be smoothly integrated in nowadays search engines: the original evaluation mechanism of a search engine is not modified, but it is seen as a black box, and simply integrated with security modules, in the form of pre- and post-processors.