Focused Crawling Using Navigational Rank

摘要

The goal of focused crawling is to use limited resources to effectively discover web pages related to a specific topic rather than downloading all accessible web documents. The major challenge in focused crawling is how to effectively determine each hyperlink's capability of leading to target pages. To compute this capability, we1 present a novel approach, called Navigational Rank (NR). In general, NR is a kind of two-step and two-direction credit propagation approach. Compared to existing methods, NR mainly has three advantages. First, NR is dynamically updated during the crawling progress, which can adapt to different website structures very well. Second, when the crawling seed is far away from the target pages, and the target pages only constitute a small portion of the whole website, NR shows a significant performance advantage. Third, NR computes each link's capability of leading to target pages by considering both the target and non-target pages it leads to. This global knowledge causes a better performance than only using target pages. We have performed extensive experiments for performance evaluation of the proposed approach using two groups of large-scale, real-world datasets from two different domains. The experimental results show that our approach is domain-independent and significantly outperforms the state-of-arts.