CS315 Link Analysis

Three generations of Search Engines

Anchor text
Link analysis for ranking

Pagerank
HITS

1st Generation: Content Similarity

Content Similarity Ranking:
The more rare words two documents share,
the more similar they are
Documents are treated as bags of words
(no effort to understand the contents)
Similarity is measured by vector angles

t3

Query Results are ranked

by sorting the angles
between query and documents

d
2

d1
t1

t2

But we also have links (los links!)

Page B

Page A
Anchor text

hyperlink

Assumption 1:
A hyperlink from a page denotes vote of
confidence to second page (quality signal)
Assumption 2:
The anchor text of the hyperlink
describes the target page (textual context)

2nd Generation: Add Popularity

A hyperlink
from a page in site A
to some page in site B
is considered a popularity
vote from site A to site B
Score of a page =
number of in-links

www.aa.com
1
www.bb.com
2

www.cc.com
1

www.dd.com
2

Query Processing

First retrieve all pages

meeting the text query (say
venture capital).
Order these by the link
popularity (of the page or the
site)

www.zz.com
0

3rd Generation: Add Reputation

Each page starts with some basic reputation (e.g.,
=1)
and repeatedly distributes equal fractions to its links
(while receiving from them)
until some equilibrium
The reputation PageRank of a page P =
the sum
PR(W1 ) PR(W 2 )
PR(W n )
of a fair fraction of the reputations PR(W ) =
+
+...+
O(W1 )
O(W 2 )
O(W n )
of all pages P j that point to P
Beautiful Math behind it
PR = principal eigenvector

of the webs link matrix

PR equivalent to the chance
of randomly surfing to the page

Idea similar to academic co-citations

Roots of PR: Citation Analysis

Citation frequency

The kind of background work Deans are doing at tenure

time

Co-citation coupling frequency

Co-citations with a given author measures

impact
Are you co-cited with influential publications?

Bibliographic coupling frequency

Articles that co-cite the same articles are related

Citation indexing

Who is author cited by?

PageRank PR

Complete Definition

W is a web page
Wi are the web pages that have a link to W
O(Wi) is the number of out-links from Wi
t is the teleportation probability (e.g. 0.15)
N is the size of the web (that we have seen)

t
PR(W1 ) PR(W 2 )
PR(W n )
PR(W ) = + (1 t)(
+
+...+
)
N
O(W1 )
O(W 2 )
O(W n )
W1

W1

W2
W2

W3
W3

W.

PageRank: Iterative Computation

t
PR(W1 ) PR(W 2 )
PR(W n )
PR(W ) = + (1 t)(
+
+...+
)
N
O(W1 )
O(W 2 )
O(W n )
t is normally set to 0.15,
but for this example, for simplicity lets set it to 0.5
Set initial PR values to 1
Solve the following equations iteratively:

PR(A) = 0.5 / 3 + 0.5PR(C)

PR(B) = 0.5 / 3 + 0.5(PR(A) /2)
PR(C) = 0.5 / 3 + 0.5(PR(A) /2 + PR(B))

Example
Computation
of PR
in Excel

Pagerank Matrix Multiplication Equivalent Def.

Imagine a browser doing a random walk on web pages:

Start at a random page P

At each step,
walk with equal probability out of the current page
along one of the links on that page,
Continue doing this random
1/3
walk for a long time
1/3
P
1/3

In the steady state

each page has a long-term visit rate:
Use this rate as the pages score.

Not quite enough

The web is full of dead-ends.

Random walk can get stuck in dead-ends.

Makes no sense to talk about long-term visit rates.

??

Teleporting
At a dead end,
jump to a random web page.
At any non-dead end,

With probability, say, 15%,

jump to a random web page.
With remaining probability (85%),
go out on a random link.
t=0.15 is the teleporting parameter.

Result of teleporting
Now cannot get stuck locally.
There exists a computable longterm rate
at which any page is visited

This not obvious, but it has been

proven!

How do we compute this visit

rate?

Markov chains:

abstractions of random walks

A Markov chain consists of n states,

and an nn transition probability matrix P.
At each step, we are in exactly one of the
states.
For 1 i,j n,
the matrix entry Pij
tells us the probability of j being the next
n
state,
Pij 1. in state i.

given we are currently

j 1
Clearly, for all i,
i

Pij

Computing PR with Markov chains

Example (next two slides):
Represent the teleporting random walk
with teleporting parameter t=15%
as a Markov chain, for this graph:

Computing P with Matrix Multiplication

Start with Adjacency matrix A of the Web Graph

If there is hyperlink from i to j, Aij = 1, else Aij = 0

If

a row has all 0s,

replace each element by 1/N

Else

divide each 1 by the number of 1s in the row

Multiply the matrix by 1-t
Add t/N to every entry of the resulting matrix

P=

Computing all Pageranks P=

Theorem:
Regardless of where we start, we
eventually reach the steady state a.
Start with any distribution
(say x=(1 0 0)).

After one step, were at xP;

after two steps at xP2 ,
then xP3 and so on.
Eventually means for large k, xPk = a.

Algorithm: multiply x by increasing

powers of P
until the product looks stable.

Pagerank summary
Preprocessing:

Given graph of links, build matrix P.

From it compute a.
The entry ai is a number between 0 and 1: the
pagerank of page i.

Query processing:

Retrieve pages meeting query.

Rank them by their pagerank.
Order is query-independent
If PR(A) > PR(B) for some query, it beats it in every
query

How is Pagerank used?

http://www.google.com/corporate/tec
h.html

PageRank Technology:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by

considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.
Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher
PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search
results.
This claim has recently changed:
Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to
order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly
basis

Pagerank is dead, long live Pagerank!