A unified framework for Web link analysis

Web link analysis has been proved to significantly enhance the precision of Web searching in practice. Among existing approaches, Kleinberg's (1998) HITS and Google's PageRank are the two most representative algorithms that employ explicit hyperlink structure among Web pages to conduct link analysis, and DirectHit represents the other extreme that takes the user's access frequency as an implicit link to the Web page for assessing its importance. We propose a novel link analysis algorithm which puts both explicit and implicit link structures under a unified framework, and show that HITS and DirectHit are essentially two extreme instances of our proposed method. One important advantage of our method is its ability to analyze not only the hyperlinks between Web pages but also the interactions between users and the Web at the same time. The importance of Web pages and users can reinforce each other to improve Web link analysis. Compared with traditional HITS and DirectHit algorithms, our method further improves the search precision by 11.8% and 25.3%.