Ranking Web Pages Using Machine Learning Approaches

One of the key components which ensures the acceptance of web search service is the web page ranker - a component which is said to have been the main contributing factor to the early successes of Google. It is well established that a machine learning method such as the Graph Neural Network (GNN) is able to learn and estimate Google's page ranking algorithm. This paper shows that the GNN can successfully learn many other Web page ranking methods e.g. TrustRank, HITS and OPIC. Experimental results show that GNN may be suitable to learn any arbitrary web page ranking scheme, and hence, may be more flexible than any other existing web page ranking scheme. The significance of this observation lies in the fact that it is possible to learn ranking schemes for which no algorithmic solution exists or is known.