Such relationships have been used by many search engines to rank query results. An authoritative page is a page with many incoming links and a hub page is a page with many outgoing links. This technique organizes topic spaces as a smaller set of hub and authoritative pages and provides an effective means for summarizing query results. Preliminary experiments show improved results by introducing similarity measurements of linked documents. Their algorithm further considers page fan out in propagating scores.
Links are also useful information for efficient crawling of high quality documents on the Web.
Chakrabarti et al. Provided with example documents, a focused crawler analyzes its crawl boundary to find the links that are likely to be more relevant for the crawl, and avoids irrelevant regions of the Web. A substantial amount of work has been carried out by the database community to augment traditional SQL, the database query language for content search, with path expressions for link traversal. Florescu et al. Today, almost every institution has its home Web site, with links connecting internal pages together.