PageRank, HITS and a unified framework for link analysis

Two popular link-based webpage ranking algorithms are (i) PageRank[1] and (ii) HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Selection)[3]. HITS makes the crucial distinction of hubs and authorities and computes them in a mutually reinforcing way. PageRank considers the hyperlink weight normalization and the equilibrium distribution of random surfers as the citation score. We generalize and combine these key concepts into a unified framework, in which we prove that rankings produced by PageRank and HITS are both highly correlated with the ranking by in-degree and out-degree.