Random Walks on the World Wide Web

Abstract

This article presents RandomWalkWeb, a package developed to perform random walks on the World Wide Web and to visualize the resulting data. Building upon the packageʼs functionality, we collected empirical network data consisting of 35,616 unique URLs (approximately 133,500 steps). An analysis was performed at the domain level and several properties of the web were measured. In particular, we estimated the power-law exponent g for the inand out-degree distributions, and obtained values of 2.10± 0.09 and 2.36± 0.1, respectively. These values were found to be in good agreement with previously published results.