VIPAS: Virtual Link Powered Authority Search in the Web Chi-Chun Lin and Ming-Syan Chen   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Web & Statistics (Session A10) Abstract With the exponential growth of the World Wide Web, looking for pages with high quality and rel- evance in the Web has become an important re- search field. There have been many keyword- based search engines built for this purpose. How- ever, these search engines usually suffer from the problem that a relevant Web page may not contain the keyword in its page text. Algorithms exploit- ing the link structure of Web documents, such as HITS, have also been proposed to overcome the problems of traditional search engines. Though these algorithms perform better than keyword- based search engines, they still have some defects. Among others, one major problem is that links in Web pages are only able to reflect the view of the page authors on the topic of those pages but not that of the page readers. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm with the idea of us- ing virtual links which are created according to what the user behaves in browsing the output list of the query result. These virtual links are then employed to identify authoritative resources in the Web. Specifically, the algorithm, referred to as al- gorithm VIPAS (standing for virtual link powered authority search), is divided into three phases. The first phase performs basic link analysis. The sec- ond phase collects statistics by observing the user behavior in browsing pages listed in the query re- sult, and virtual links are then created according to what observed. In the third phase, these vir- tual links as well as real ones are taken together to produce an updated list of authoritative pages that will be presented to the user when the query ©2004 Association for Computing Machinery