webgrafiek

Webgrafiek, or web graph, is the directed graph that represents the structure of hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. In this graph, nodes denote web pages (or documents), and each directed edge points from a source page to a target page to indicate that the source contains a hyperlink to the target. The webgrafiek is central to web science, information retrieval, and network analysis.

The webgrafiek is enormous and dynamic, with billions of pages and edges that change as pages are created, updated, or removed. Empirical studies show that the degree distributions follow heavy tails, with a few pages having many incoming or outgoing links while the majority have relatively few. The graph also exhibits small-world properties and contains a large strongly connected component, though many parts of the graph are reachable only in one direction.

In practice, webgrafieken are stored as adjacency lists or in compressed formats to handle scale. The WebGraph framework and related formats have been developed to represent large graphs efficiently. Processing uses specialized graph frameworks and distributed computing approaches, such as Pregel-, GraphX-, or Giraph-style systems, to compute metrics at web scale.

Common applications include link analysis and ranking algorithms such as PageRank and HITS, crawl planning, and studies of information diffusion and navigation. Public crawls and datasets, like Common Crawl and WebDataCommons, provide large-scale web graph snapshots for research.