How search engines shape the web

The state of the web today has been and continues to be greatly influenced by the existence of web-search engines. This panel will discuss the ways in which search engines have affected the web in the past and ways in which they may affect it in the future. Both positive and negative effects will be discussed as will potential measures to combat the latter. Besides the obvious ways in which search engines help people find content, other effects to be discussed include: the whole phenomenon of web-page spam, based on both text and link (e.g. link farms), the business of “Search Engine Optimization” (optimizing pages to rank highly in web-search results), the bided-terms business and the associated problem of click fraud, to name a few.