Hidden Tree Structure is a Key to the Emergence of Scaling in the World Wide Web

Preferential attachment is the most popular explanation for the emergence of scaling behavior in the World Wide Web, but this explanation has been challenged by the global information hypothesis, the existence of linear preference and the emergence of new big internet companies in the real world. We notice that most websites have an obvious feature that their pages are organized as a tree (namely hidden tree) and hence propose a new model that introduces a hidden tree structure into the ErdősRényi model by adding a new rule: when one node connects to another, it should also connect to all nodes in the path between these two nodes in the hidden tree. The experimental results show that the degree distribution of the generated graphs would obey power law distributions and have variable high clustering coefficients and variable small average lengths of shortest paths. The proposed model provides an alternative explanation to the emergence of scaling in the World Wide Web without the above-mentioned difficulties, and also explains the “preferential attachment” phenomenon.