The Impact of Search Engines on Virus Propagation

Abstract

With the popularization of computers and the development of information engineering, the emergence of search engines makes it possible to get the information needed from big data quickly and efficiently. However, in recent years, a multiplicity of new viruses have been propagated by search engines. Many researchers choose to cut off the source of virus propagation, ignoring the virus immunization strategy based on the search engine. In this paper, we analyze the impact of search engines on virus propagation. First, considering the immune effect and cost, two kinds of immune mechanisms based on the search engine that have greater practicability are defined. Second, immune mechanisms based on the search engine are theoretically analyzed by the iteration method and the dynamic method. The results show that this immunization strategy can slow down or eliminate the propagation of a virus to a certain extent. Third, three real social network data sets are used to simulate and analyze the immune mechanism. We find that when the proportion of nodes being infected and the proportion of infected nodes being identified by the search engine satisfy a certain relationship, our immune mechanism can inhibit the spread of viruses, which confirms our theoretical analysis results.