Measuring Index Quality Using Random Walks on the Web

Recent research has studied how to measure the size of a search engine, in terms of the number of pages indexed. In this paper, we consider a di erent measure for search engines, namely the quality of the pages in a search engine index. We provide a simple, e ective algorithm for approximating the quality of an index by performing a random walk on the Web, and we use this methodology to compare the index quality of several major search engines.