A survey of Web metrics

The unabated growth and increasing significance of the World Wide Web has resulted in a flurry of research activity to improve its capacity for serving information more effectively. But at the heart of these efforts lie implicit assumptions about quality and usefulness of Web resources and services. This observation points towards measurements and models that quantify various attributes of web sites. The science of measuring all aspects of information, especially its storage and retrieval or informetrics has interested information scientists for decades before the existence of the Web. Is Web informetrics any different, or is it just an application of classical informetrics to a new medium? In this article, we examine this issue by classifying and discussing a wide ranging set of Web metrics. We present the origins, measurement functions, formulations and comparisons of well-known Web metrics for quantifying Web graph properties, Web page significance, Web page similarity, search and retrieval, usage characterization and information theoretic properties. We also discuss how these metrics can be applied for improving Web information access and use.