Tom_Dalton - 10:06 pm on Apr 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

So nobody's addressed what seems to me a major issue with the paper: the authors discuss the idea of "unreferenced pages" and "non-referencing pages." This is a key concept, defined early on in the paper. However, as any frequent user of the Internet will note, very, very few pages fall into either of these camps.

Standard site navigation exists on every page I have ever seen, basically. Every page links to SOMETHING. A link back home, a link to the other sections or whatever. (Fine -- I haven't exhaustively studied this, but my point is clear, I hope?)

However, just before discussing the unreferenced and non-referencing pages, the paper says "we also remove self hyperlinks." Does that mean links to other pages within the same domain? They state clearly that they are not analyzing sites, but individual pages. So the assumption I had made was that "self hyperlinks" are the internal anchor tags that move you around a single page.

So... Does this paper assume the ability to detect and discount 'standard' site navigation? Is it by domain, or is there some other process at work (like MSN's discussion of page zones)?

Anybody else thinking about this?