2011/10/27 by Lingfei Wu, Jiang Zhang, Wu, Lingfei +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #cs.IR #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1110.6097
12 pages, 7 figures
openalex publication_date 2011/10/27 · arxiv created 2012/11/06 · arxiv updated 2012/11/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Background: The collective browsing behavior of users gives rise to a flow network transporting attention between websites. By analyzing the structure of this network we uncovered a nontrivial scaling regularity concerning the impact of websites. Methodology: We constructed three clickstreams networks, whose nodes were websites and edges were formed by the users switching between sites. We developed an indicator Ci as a measure of the impact of site i and investigated its correlation with the traffic of the site Ai both on the three networks and across the language communities within the networks. Conclusions: We found that the impact of websites increased slower than their traffic. Specifically, there existed a scaling relationship between Ci and Ai with an exponent gamma smaller than 1. We suggested that this scaling relationship characterized the decentralized structure of the clickstream circulation: the World Wide Web is a system that favors small sites in reassigning the collective attention of users.