Ying Xu

Measuring and Modeling the Web Ying Xu

The last couple of decades have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the World Wide Web. The Web has become a ubiquitous channel for information sharing and dissemination. This has created a whole new set of research challenges. This book describes several research contributions in an endeavor towards a better understanding of the Web. In the first part of this book, we address the problem of estimating the sizes of the Web and search engine indexes. This problem has drawn keen interests from both academic and search engine industry in recent years. We present both empirical methods and theoretical results to this problem. After measuring the size of the Web, we are further interested in understanding its structure. In the second half of the book, we use a powerful theoretical tool called webgraph model to study the Web. The topics span from theoretical analysis of graph properties to analyzing privacy in social networks.