Power law in website ratings

TL;DR

This paper investigates web-rating data, revealing that the relationship between website hits and hosts follows a power law rather than a simple linear pattern, with implications for understanding website popularity.

Contribution

The paper uncovers a new power law relationship in web ratings data, challenging the common assumption of linear dependence between hits and hosts.

Findings

Power law relationship between hits and hosts in web data

Linear dependence is only a partial case of a broader power law

Discovery of a new power law on the Internet

Abstract

In the practical work of websites popularization, analysis of their efficiency and downloading it is of key importance to take into account web-ratings data. The main indicators of website traffic include the number of unique hosts from which the analyzed website was addressed and the number of granted web pages (hits) per unit time (for example, day, month or year). Of certain interest is the ratio between the number of hits (S) and hosts (H). In practice there is even used such a concept as "average number of viewed pages" (S/H), which on default supposes a linear dependence of S on H. What actually happens is that linear dependence is observed only as a partial case of power dependence, and not always. Another new power law has been discovered on the Internet, in particular, on the WWW.