Link Analysis-Why is it important?

When you search for CodeZoned using Facebook search bar, you receive the results almost instantly. Similarly, when Facebook shows you your news feed, something quite amazing is working behind it. That technique is known as Link Analysis. This post will add to your knowledge about the same.

Let’s first see what link analysis actually is and how it works. Wikipedia defines Link Analysis as a data analysis technique used to evaluate relationships between nodes. Here nodes can be anything like people on Facebook, Web Pages, Organization and many more.

The working of Link Analysis is somewhat mathematical. The nodes on a graph are represented in a matrix making it a eigenvalue problem thus making it mathematical. The eigenvalues help in providing relative importance to each node ,which can be helpful in evaluating the relationships between nodes which is the main aim of link analysis.

As already mentioned, Link Analysis has various applications like Google Page Rank, Google+, Facebook friend suggestion, Netflix and Hulu for movies, Youtube for ‘Videos’. Though the objective and parameters are different but the mathematics behind them remains the same.

In addition some algorithms that use link analysis technique are PageRank and HITS algorithm.

It is quite surprising that first search engine to use link analysis technique was RankDex(two years before Google) founded by Robin Li.

I’m pretty sure that after reading this post you will surely search for Link Analysis to know more about it. So, if you find any mistake here then do notify us in the comments. Bye!! Thank you, for reading this post.