Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web

TLDR

The Web exhibits a pronounced rich‑get‑richer pattern, with a few sites dominating hyperlinks and traffic, a phenomenon also seen in other natural networks such as citations, collaborations, and power grids. The study aims to quantify how new and poorly connected nodes can compete for links and to characterize the competition for links across web categories. A simple generative model combining preferential and uniform attachment is used to quantify the growth of rich nodes and the competition of new nodes. The analysis reveals that within specific categories the link distribution is unimodal and less skewed, and the proposed model accurately reproduces the connectivity patterns of category‑specific pages, the overall Web, and other social networks.

Abstract

As a whole, the World Wide Web displays a striking “rich get richer” behavior, with a relatively small number of sites receiving a disproportionately large share of hyperlink references and traffic. However, hidden in this skewed global distribution, we discover a qualitatively different and considerably less biased link distribution among subcategories of pages—for example, among all university homepages or all newspaper homepages. Although the connectivity distribution over the entire web is close to a pure power law, we find that the distribution within specific categories is typically unimodal on a log scale, with the location of the mode, and thus the extent of the rich get richer phenomenon, varying across different categories. Similar distributions occur in many other naturally occurring networks, including research paper citations, movie actor collaborations, and United States power grid connections. A simple generative model, incorporating a mixture of preferential and uniform attachment, quantifies the degree to which the rich nodes grow richer, and how new (and poorly connected) nodes can compete. The model accurately accounts for the true connectivity distributions of category-specific web pages, the web as a whole, and other social networks.