Analysis of Link Graph Compression Techniques

Links between documents have been shown to be useful in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks - for example, Google has been telling us for many years now that the PageRank authority measure is at the heart of its relevance calculations. To use such link analysis techniques in a search engine, special tools are required to store the link matrix of the collection of documents, due to the high number of links typically involved. This work is concerned with the application of compression to the link graph. We compare several techniques of compressing link graphs, and conclude on speed and space metrics, using various standard IR test collections.