Graph-Theoretic Web Algorithms: An Overview

The World Wide Web is growing rapidly and revolutionizing the means of information access. It can be modeled as a directed graph in which a node represents a Web page and an edge represents a hyperlink. Currently the number of nodes in this gigantic Web graph is over four billion and is growing by more than seven million nodes a day--without any centralized control. The study of this graph is essential for designing efficient algorithms for crawling, searching, and ranking Web resources. Knowledge of the structure of the Web graph can be also exploited for attaining efficiency and comprehensiveness in Web navigation. This paper describes algorithms for graph-theoretic analysis of the Web.