Temporal link analysis Temporal link analysis Temporal link analysis Temporal link analysis

Although time has been recognized as in important dimension in the co-citation literature, to date is has not been incorporated into the analogous process of link analysis on the Web. In this paper we discuss several aspects and uses of the time dimension in the context of Web IR. We describe the ideal case - where search engines trace and store temporal data for each of the pages in their repository. In order to demonstrate our claims, we use a somewhat simplistic approach, which approximates the age of the page's content. We introduce several applications into which such temporal data can be incorporated. We show that even using this crude measure it is possible to detect and expose significant events and trends. We predict that by using a more robust method for detecting a page's date of last modification, search engines will be able to provide results that are more timely and better reflect current real-life trends than those they provide today