Ranking the Web Frontier

The celebrated PageRank algorithm has proved to be a very effective paradigm for ranking results of web search algorithms. In this paper we refine this basic paradigm to take into account several evolving prominent features of the web, and propose several algorithmic innovations. First, we analyze features of the rapidly growing "frontier" of the web, namely the part of the web that crawlers are unable to cover for one reason or another. We analyze the effect of these pages and find it to be significant. We suggest ways to improve the quality of ranking by modeling the growing presence of "link rot" on the web as more sites and pages fall out of maintenance. Finally we suggest new methods of ranking that are motivated by the hierarchical structure of the web, are more efficient than PageRank, and may be more resistant to direct manipulation.