Scale-free networks growth by ranking

Santo Fortunato

Indiana University

Any model of growth of the Web graph requires a criterion for a new Web page to be linked to the others. This process is ultimately related to the knowledge that users have about Web pages and the way they discover them. Search engines are probably the most popular way for users to retrieve information from the Web and play an ever-increasing role in the real discovery process of Web pages. We propose a model for the growth of the Web graph based on the interplay between users and search engines. We show that with a minimal set of empirical inputs our model is able to shape a network with the same general topology of the real Web graph. In addition, the model allows to investigate the important issue of Web traffic, and leads to a very good description of empirical data.