Web information credibility analysis by geographical social support

Abstract

Since our daily lives strongly depend on information obtained by Web search, the credibility of Web search results has become crucial. An important aspect of the credibility of search results is regionality of Web pages. In this paper, we propose a system for helping users assess the credibility of search results by measuring and presenting the regionality of support to Web pages. We conceive two different types of measures for evaluating "geographical social support": the uniformity of support and the proximity of support. The uniformity of geographical support (US) indicates uniformity of geographic distribution of Web pages linking to a Web page. It is calculated by using the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. The proximity of geographical support (PS) express how a page is supported by pages geographically located close to the page. We describe our implemented prototype system that shows the two measures for Web search results.