A mathematical model for human flesh search engine

Abstract

Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE) is a phenomenon of massive researching using Web media such as blogs and forums with a purpose of exposing personal details of perceived misbehaviors. With the increasing efficiency and convenience of the Web, Human Flesh Search Engine is becoming more and more powerful and able to discover information which is "mission impossible" by other conventional means. Existing research work focuses on legal or privacy issues of this emerging tool, while we aim at building a mathematical model to understand the evolution of the search process and hence to evaluate the power of this massive collaboration intelligence. Viewing the initiator and target of a search campaign as source/destination nodes in the social network, a HFSE searching is modeled as a probabilistic flooding routing algorithm in the graph. Typical Human Flesh Search Engine cases and simulation-based experiments are used to evaluate the validity of the model and provide new insights for HFSE. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.