The Intelligent surfer: Probabilistic Combination of Link and Content Information in PageRank

Traditional information retrieval techniques can give poor results on the Web, with its vast scale and highly variable content quality. Recently, however, it was found that Web search results can be much improved by using the information contained in the link structure between pages. The two best-known algorithms which do this are HITS [1] and PageRank [2]. The latter is used in the highly successful Google search engine [3]. The heuristic underlying both of these approaches is that pages with many inlinks are more likely to be of high quality than pages with few inlinks, given that the author of a page will presumably include in it links to pages that s/he believes are of high quality.