Trend detection through temporal link analysis

Abstract

Although time has been recognized as an important dimension in the co-citation literature, to date it has not been incorporated into the analogous process of link analysis on the Web. In this paper, we discuss several aspects and uses of the time dimension in the context of Web information retrieval. We describe the ideal casewhere search engines track and store temporal data for each of the pages in their repository, assigning timestamps to the hyperlinks embedded within the pages. We introduce several applications which benefit from the availability of such timestamps. To demonstrate our claims, we use a somewhat simplistic approach, which dates links by approximating the age of the page's content. We show that by using this crude measure alone it is possible to detect and expose significant events and trends. We predict that by using more robust methods for tracking modifications in the content of pages, search engines will be able to provide results that are more timely and better reflect current real-life trends than those they provide today.

Temporal-Relational Classifiers for Prediction in Evolving Domains

“…Amitay et al [1] have also identified aspects of temporal locality in Web domains, showing that incorporating hyperlink timestamps into link-based page-ranking algorithms can improve retrieval accuracy.…”

Search the past with the portuguese web archive

“…Hearst's book presents a comprehensive analysis of user interface design to search the live web but searching over historical web collections is not addressed [10]. For instance, the date of publication is mandatory on any news article, but very hard to identify on a typical web page [3,5]. Note that the date of publication is crucial to enable users to explore the temporal perspective of data.…”

Citation Graph Based Ranking in Invenio

“…There has been some research activity also in the area of "temporal link analysis", mostly done on WWW pages. In [6] the authors present several aspects and uses of the time dimension in the context of Web IR. K. Berberich et al [7] argue that the freshness of web content and link structure is a factor that needs to be taken into account in link analysis when computing the importance of a page.…”