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HHS Public Access Author manuscript Proc Int Conf Web Search Data Min. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 March 24. |
Published in final edited form as:
Proc Int Conf Web Search Data Min. 2016 February; 2016: 615-624. doi:10.1145/2835776.2835832.
Improving Website Hyperlink Structure Using Server Logs
Ashwin Paranjape[1],
Standford University
Robert West[1],
Stanford University
Leila Zia, and
Wikimedia Foundation
Jure Leskovec
Stanford University
Abstract
Good websites should be easy to navigate via hyperlinks, yet maintaining a high-quality link structure is difficult. Identifying pairs of pages that should be linked may be hard for human editors, especially if the site is large and changes frequently. Further, given a set of useful link candidates, the task of incorporating them into the site can be expensive, since it typically involves humans editing pages. In the light of these challenges, it is desirable to develop data-driven methods for automating the link placement task. Here we develop an approach for automatically finding useful hyperlinks to add to a website. We show that passively collected server logs, beyond telling us which existing links are useful, also contain implicit signals indicating which nonexistent links would be useful if they were to be introduced. We leverage these signals to model the future usefulness of yet nonexistent links. Based on our model, we define the problem of link placement under budget constraints and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on Wikipedia, a large website for which we have access to both server logs (used for finding useful new links) and the complete revision history (containing a ground truth of new links). As our method is based exclusively on standard server logs, it may also be applied to any other website, as we show with the example of the biomedical research site Simtk.
1. INTRODUCTION
Websites are networks of interlinked pages, and a good website makes it easy and intuitive for users to navigate its content. One way of making navigation intuitive and content discoverable is to provide carefully placed hyperlinks. Consider for instance Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The links that connect articles are essential for presenting concepts in their appropriate context, for letting users find the information they
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