2 papers of interest

I posted these over at SEW and wanted to share them here as well. I am leaving so i have no time to blog about them, but I am sure that someone will. They are both by Santo Fortunato et al.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0511/0511005.pdf

"Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web."

and: "How to make the top ten: Approximating PageRank from indegree"

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0511/0511016.pdf

"PageRank has become a key element in the success of search engines, allowing to rank the most important hits in the top screen of results. One key aspect that distinguishes PageRank from other prestige measures such as in-degree is its global nature. From the information provider perspective, this makes it difficult or impossible to predict how their pages will be ranked. Consequently a market has emerged for the optimization of search engine results. Here we study the accuracy with which PageRank can be approximated by in-degree, a local measure made freely available by search engines. Theoretical and empirical analyses lead to conclude that given the weak degree correlations in the Web link graph, the approximation can be relatively accurate, giving service and information providers an effective new marketing tool."

Hope you find them interesting.

Happy xmas and new year to you.

thank you... good read

Sory I am not able to open this mention PDF.

Quite obvious, since this thread is more than 1.5 yrs old.

@!!! - Please stop digging graves!