Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Two popular webpage ranking algorithms are HITS and PageRank. HITS emphasizes mutual reinforcement between authority and hub webpages, while PageRank emphasizes hyperlink weight normalization and web surfing based on random walk models. We systematically generalize/combine these concepts into a unified framework. The ranking framework contains a large algorithm space; HITS and PageRank are two extreme ends in this space. We study several normalized ranking algorithms which are intermediate between HITS and PageRank, and obtain closed-form solutions. We show that, to first order approximation, all ranking algorithms in this framework, including PageRank and HITS, lead to same ranking which is highly correlated with ranking by indegree. These results support the notion that in web resource ranking indegree and outdegree are of fundamental importance. Rankings of webgraphs of different sizes and queries are presented to illustrate our analysis.