Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.
In this paper we present an experimental study of the properties of web graphs. We study a large crawl from 2001 of 200M pages and about 1.4 billion edges made available by the WebBase project at Stanford [17]. We report our experimental findings on the topological properties of such graphs, such as the number of bipartite cores and the distribution of degree, PageRank values and strongly connected components.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.