Thelwall M. "Can Google's PageRank be used to find the most important academic Web pages? J Doc 59(2):205-217 2003

[Eugene Garfield]

Mike Thelwall : m.thelwall at wlv.ac.uk


TITLE       Can Google's PageRank be used to find the most important
            academic Web pages?
AUTHRO      Thelwall M
JOURNAL     JOURNAL OF DOCUMENTATION 59 (2): 205-217 2003

Document type: Article     Language: English     Cited References: 32
Times Cited: 0      Explanation

Abstract:
Google's PageRank is an influential algorithm that uses a model of Web use
that is dominated by its link structure in order to rank pages by their
estimated value to the Web community. This paper reports on the outcome of
applying the algorithm to the Web sites of three national university
systems in order to test whether it is capable of identifying the most
important Web pages. The results are also compared with simple inlink
counts. It was discovered that the highest inlinked pages do not always
have the highest PageRank, indicating that the two metrics are genuinely
different, even for the top pages. More significantly, however, internal
links dominated external links for the high ranks in either method and
superficial reasons accounted for high scores in both cases. It is
concluded that PageRank is not useful for identifying the top pages in a
site and that it must be combined with a powerful text matching techniques
in order to get the quality of information retrieval results provided by
Google.

Author Keywords:
Internet, universities, information retrieval, algorithms, effectiveness

KeyWords Plus:
IMPACT FACTORS, CRAWLER

Addresses:
Thelwall M, Wolverhampton Univ, Sch Comp & Informat Technol, Wolverhampton,
England
Wolverhampton Univ, Sch Comp & Informat Technol, Wolverhampton, England

Publisher:
EMERALD GROUP PUBLISHING LTD, 60/62 TOLLER LANE, BRADFORD BD8 9BY, W
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND

IDS Number:
730YD

ISSN:
0022-0418

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 THELWALL M            J DOCUMENTATION                                 2001
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 THELWALL M            PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE                             2001
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