Incremental C-Rank: An effective and efficient ranking algorithm for dynamic Web environments

Web page ranking is one of the core components of search engines. Given a user query, ranking aims to provide a ranked list of Web pages that the user is likely to prefer the most. By and large, the ranking algorithms can be categorized into content-based approaches, link-based approaches, and hybrid approaches. Hybrid ranking algorithms, which exploit both the content and link information, are the most popular and extensively studied techniques. Among the hybrid algorithms, C-Rank combines content and link information in a very effective way using the concept of contribution. This algorithm is known to provide high performance in terms of both accurate and prompt responses to user queries. However, C-Rank suffers from very high costs to reflect the highly dynamic and extremely frequent changes in the World Wide Web, because it re-computes all of the C-Rank scores used for ranking from scratch to reflect the changes. As a result, C-Rank may be considered inappropriate to provide users with accurate and up-to-date search results. This paper aims to remedy this limitation of C-Rank. We propose incremental C-Rank, which is designed to update the C-Rank scores of only a carefully chosen portion of the Web pages rather than those of all of the Web pages without any accuracy loss. Our experimental results on a real-world dataset confirm both the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Web page ranking is one of the core components of search engines. Given a user query, ranking aims to provide a ranked list of Web pages that the user is likely to prefer the most. By and large, the ranking algorithms can be categorized into content-based approaches, link-based approaches, and hybrid approaches. Hybrid ranking algorithms, which exploit both the content and link information, are the most popular and extensively studied techniques. Among the hybrid algorithms, C-Rank combines content and link information in a very effective way using the concept of contribution. This algorithm is known to provide high performance in terms of both accurate and prompt responses to user queries. However, C-Rank suffers from very high costs to reflect the highly dynamic and extremely frequent changes in the World Wide Web, because it re-computes all of the C-Rank scores used for ranking from scratch to reflect the changes. As a result, C-Rank may be considered inappropriate to provide users with accurate and up-to-date search results. This paper aims to remedy this limitation of C-Rank. We propose incremental C-Rank, which is designed to update the C-Rank scores of only a carefully chosen portion of the Web pages rather than those of all of the Web pages without any accuracy loss. Our experimental results on a real-world dataset confirm both the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.