ICREA Professor

Abstract:  The Web can be seen as a graph in which every page is a node, and every hyper-link between two pages is an edge. This Web graph forms a scale-free network: a graph in which the distribution of the degree of the nodes is very skewed. This graph is also self-similar, in terms that a small part of the graph shares most properties with the entire graph. This paper compares the characteristics of several national Web domains, by studying the Web graph of large collections obtained using a Web crawler; the comparison unveils striking similarities between the Web graphs of very different countries. 1