In Web retrieval, there are many cases of competition between authors of Web documents: their incentive is to have their documents highly ranked for queries of interest. As such, the Web is a prominent example of a competitive search setting. Past work on competitive search focused on ranking functions based solely on relevance estimation. We study ranking functions that integrate a results-diversification aspect. We show that the competitive search setting with diversity-based ranking has an equilibrium. Furthermore, we theoretically and empirically show that the phenomenon of authors mimicking content in documents highly ranked in the past, which was demonstrated in previous work, is mitigated when search results diversification is applied.

翻译：在网络检索中，网页文档作者之间存在许多竞争情况：他们的动机是使其文档在相关查询中获得高排名。因此，网络是竞争性搜索环境的典型示例。以往关于竞争性搜索的研究主要集中于仅基于相关性估计的排序函数。我们研究了整合结果多样化因素的排序函数。我们证明，基于多样性的竞争性搜索环境存在均衡。此外，我们从理论和实证两方面表明，当应用搜索结果多样化时，作者模仿过去高排名文档内容的现象（这在先前工作中已得到证实）会得到缓解。