ABSTRACT
The World Wide Web (the Web) was started as an experimental network in 1991. Its growth since then can only be termed explosive. It has several billion pages today and is growing exponentially with time. This growth is totally distributed. There is no central authority to control the growth. The hyperlinks endow the Web with some structure in the sense that viewing the individual web pages as nodes and the hyperlinks as directed edges between them, the Web can be looked upon as a directed graph. What stands out is that this directed graph is not only dynamic—it is rapidly growing and changing—it has been much too large for some time to even have a complete snapshot. Experimental understanding of its structure is based on large but partial web crawls. What properties are being investigated is itself driven by the requirements of the increasingly sophisticated nature of the applications being developed as well as analogies and insights from fields like bibliometrics involving study of citations in academic literature [1].
