A new paradigm for ranking pages on the world wide web

Abstract

This paper describes a new paradigm for modeling traffic levels on the world wide web (WWW) using a method of entropy maximization. This traffic is subject to the conservation conditions of a circulation flow in the entire WWW, an aggregation of the WWW, or a subgraph of the WWW (such as an intranet or extranet). We specifically apply the primal and dual solutions of this model to the (static) ranking of web sites. The first of these uses an imputed measure of total traffic through a web page, the second provides an analogy of local "temperature", allowing us to quantify the "HOTness" of a page.