Explaining and Predicting Web Page Status

The World Wide Web has become a key intermediary between producers and consumers of information. While the producers strive to increase visibility for their products, services, socio-political messages, etc., the consumers struggle to find reliable and relevant information. Web linkage structure has been exploited by contemporary search engines to decrease the search cost for consumers while usually also rewarding the producers of higher status Web pages. In addition to influencing visibility and accessibility, in-links, as marks of recognition, accord status to a Web page. In this paper we show how Web page status may be determined at least in part by page location and topic specificity. Moreover, we observe that the “philanthropic” contributions of a Web page, specifically contributions of information brokerage function, influence other pages into generating in-links. The observations are made in the presence of quality, domain, and topical effects. Interestingly, all of these features influencing status are “local” to a given Web page and within the control of the owner/author of the page. Since the linkage structure of the Web has affects on browsing, crawling, and search engine ranking, our results have implications for content managers, search engine marketers, and search engines.