Algorithm that changed the web to as we know it

Whether you want to:

1. Work with Search engine(s) in any form
2. Work with the web in general
3. Be a better web developer

you must know the following.

This article helps you draw the hollistic picture in your mind.

1. The whole web is Bow Tie (What!!)

The largeststudy of web’s structure suggests:

1. It is not fully interconnected (as previously believed).
2. The chance of being able to surf between two randomly chosen pages is less thanone in four.
3. Whole world wide web can be visualised as a bow tie (depicted below).

SCC: A central core contains pages between which users can surf easily.

IN: large cluster that contains pages that link to the core but cannot be reached from it. These are often new pages that have not yet been linked to.

OUT: cluster that consists of pages that can be reached from the core but do not link to it, Eg: corporate websites containing only internal links.

Other groups of pages, called ‘tendrils’ and ‘tubes’, connect to either the IN or OUT clusters, or both, but not to the core, whereas some pages are completely disconnected.

2. LINK ANALYSIS (The algorithms that presented the web as we know it)

Link analysis is a data-analysis technique used to evaluate relationships (connections) between nodes(web pages here).

From search engines and social networks to marketing analysis tools, everybody is trying to find the real structure of the Internet through time. Link analysis is arguably one of the algorithms with the most myths and confusion in the general public.

The idea behind link analysis is simple, you can represent a graph in a Matrix form making it a eigenvalue problem. This eigenvalues can give you a really good approach of the structure of the graph and the relative importance of each node. The algorithm was developed in 1976 by Gabriel Pinski and Francis Narin.

You CANNOT bypass Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors if you are a programmer, so read THIS.

Who uses these algorithms?

Google in its Page Rank, Facebook when it shows youyour news feed, Google+& Facebook friend suggestion, LinkedIn suggestions for jobs and contacts, Netflix and Hulu for movies, YouTube for videos, etc. Each one has a different objective and different parameters, but the math behind each remains the same.

Google was the first company to work with these type of algorithms, in 1996 (two years before Google) a little search engine called “RankDex” , founded by Robin Li, was already using this idea for page ranking. Finally Massimo Marchiori, the founder of “HyperSearch”, used an algorithm of page rank based on the relations between single pages. (The two founders are mentioned in the patents of Google).

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