Detecting Promotion Campaigns in Query Auto Completion

Query Auto Completion (QAC) aims to provide possible suggestions to Web search users from the moment they start entering a query, which is thought to reduce their physical and cognitive efforts in query formulation. However, the QAC has been misused by malicious users, being transformed into a new form of promotion campaign. These malicious users attack the search engines to replace legitimate auto-completion candidate suggestions with manipulated contents. Through this way, they provide a new malicious advertising service to promote their customers’ products or services in QAC. To our best knowledge, we are among the first to investigate this new type of Promotion Campaign in QAC (PCQ). Firstly, we look into the causes of PCQ based on practical commercial search query logs. We found that various queries containing certain promotion intents are submitted multiple times to search engines to promote their rankings in QAC. Secondly, an effective promotion query detection framework is proposed by promotion intent propagation on query-user bipartite graph, which takes into account the behavioral characteristics of promotion campaigns. Finally, we extend the query detection framework to promotion target detection to identify the consistent promotion target which is the inherent goal of the promotion campaign. Large-scale manual annotations on practical data set convey both the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, and an in-depth understanding of PCQ.