Link-Sensitive PageRank: An Improved Ranking Algorithm for Vertical Search Engines

The PageRank algorithm is an important link-based ranking strategy of vertical search engines, but it has a drawback of topic drift. To tackle this problem and yield more accurate search results, we present an improved algorithm to distribute the PageRank value in light of the link sensitive level of the web pages based on keywords set, which we called "Link-Sensitive PageRank". According to the keywords of user's searching, this algorithm, which takes into account the link sensitive level of the web pages' hyperlink to give different importance to different hyperlinks. Experiment results show that the improved PageRank algorithm performs better than the standard PageRank. Furthermore, it can effectively improve the "topic drift" and enhance the accuracy of information collection. The proposed PageRank algorithm can have a good application in the vertical search engines.