This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Dmitry Dvoinikov.
Original Post: The most valuable pages of the World Wide Web
Feed Title: Things That Require Further Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThingsThatRequireFurtherThinking
Feed Description: Once your species has evolved language, and you have learned language, [...] and you have something to say, [...] it doesn't take much time, energy and effort to say it. The hard part of course is having something interesting to say.
-- Geoffrey Miller
The World Wide Web contains a huge amount of files. Of those, HTML pages can point to each other (and other files too) with hyperlinks. Thus created hypertext structure can be presented with a directed graph.
Technically, the World Wide Web graph can contain cycles, but this is only possible if a page has been modified after it has been referenced. Specifically a page which has never been modified after it was created, cannot participate in a cycle. Therefore there could exist leaf pages, which are only linked to and not contain links themselves.
It is also seems reasonable that if page A links to page B, then the owner of page A somehow values page B, even if in some negative kind of way. Otherwise, he wouldn't even bother to put it there.
Now, the question is - aren't the most valuable pages of the World Wide Web the ones that are only referenced to but do not reference other pages themselves ? Taking it one step further, is a value of a page a function of N/M (where N is the number of the links to this page and M is the number of links from this page) ? Then a page with no links in it will indeed have infinite value.
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