Measuring Index Quality using Random Walks on the Web

Recent research has studied how to measure the size of a search engine, in terms of the number of pages indexed. In this paper, we consider a different measure for search engines, namely the quality of the pages in a search engine index. We provide a simple, effective algorithm for approximating the quality of an index by performing a random walk on the Web, and we use this methodology to compare the index quality of several major search engines.

Originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Eight International World Wide Web Conference, pages 213-225, 1999.