On Usage Metrics for Determining Authoritative Sites

Explosion in the number of ‘relevant’ sites (on any topic) on the Web creates a need to identify additional measures, such as quality or reliability, to rank content on the Web. Recent research has used the term authoritative to represent a broader notion of the goodness of a web page. An authoritative page is one that is both relevant and reliable, in the spirit of an “authority” on a subject. Conventional methods to rank authoritative content on the Web do so based on content interpretation of sites (e.g. most search engines), structural relationships between sites (e.g. Google) and experts’ analyses (e.g. Forrester’s rankings). In this paper we argue for an alternative approach to rank authoritative content, one based on the actual usage of the Web. In addition to lending itself to new automated approaches to rank content, preliminary results from our approach indicate that a usage-based approach may, in fact, be superior to conventional approaches for this problem. In this paper we present a new framework to identify usage metrics and list several usage metrics based on this framework. Based on actual usage data of 30,000 users’ surfing behavior, we demonstrate that a simple aggregate usage measure can in fact characterize actual bookings at travel sites better than other conventional methods that rank online travel.