Time-weighted web authoritative ranking

We investigate temporal factors in assessing the authoritativeness of web pages. We present three different metrics related to time: age, event, and trend. These metrics measure recentness, special event occurrence, and trend in revisions, respectively. An experimental dataset is created by crawling selected web pages for a period of several months. This data is used to compare page rankings by human users with rankings computed by the standard PageRank algorithm (which does not include temporal factors) and three algorithms that incorporate temporal factors, including the Time-Weighted PageRank (TWPR) algorithm introduced here. Analysis of the rankings shows that all three temporal-aware algorithms produce rankings more like those of human users than does the PageRank algorithm. Of these, the TWPR algorithm produces rankings most similar to human users', indicating that all three temporal factors are relevant in page ranking. In addition, analysis of parameter values used to weight the three temporal factors reveals that age factor has the most impact on page rankings, while trend and event factors have the second and the least impact. Proper weighting of the three factors in TWPR algorithm provides the best ranking results.