PageRank, HITS And A Unified Framework For Link Analysis

Abstract

Two popular link-based webpage ranking algorithms are (i) PageRank[1] and (ii) HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Selection)[3]. HITS makes the crucial distinction of <i>hubs</i> and <i>authorities</i> and computes them in a mutually reinforcing way. PageRank considers the hyperlink <i>weight normalization</i> and the equilibrium distribution of <i>random surfers</i> as the citation score. We generalize and combine these key concepts into a unified framework, in which we prove that rankings produced by PageRank and HITS are both highly correlated with the ranking by in-degree and out-degree.