Growth and structure of the World Wide Web: towards realistic modeling
We simulate evolution of the World Wide Web from the dynamic rules incorporating growth, bias attachment, (aid rewiring. We show that the emergent double-hierarchical structure with distinct distributions of out- and in-links is comparable with the observed empirical data when the control parameter (average graph flexibility beta) is kept in the range beta = 3-4. We then explore the Web graph by simulating (a) Web crawling to determine size and depth of connected components, and (b) a random walker that discovers the structure of connected subgraphs with dominant attractor and promoter nodes. A random walker that adapts its move strategy to mimic local node linking preferences is shown to have a short access time to "important" nodes on the Web graph. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
web graph connected component random walker access time links hierarchy