The sheer volume of Web data, together with its low signal-to-noise ratio, make it difficult for text-based search engines to locate high-quality pages. Analyzing the links between Web sites has dramatically improved the Web search experience and spawned research into the Web’s link structure. This research includes graph-theoretic studies of connectivity, which have shown the Web to have strong similarities with social networks.

Self-similarity is pervasive in social networks. While researchers have observed Web self-similarity in other contexts, finding a fractal structure in a graph-theoretic setting adds further evidence to the Web’s small-world social nature. Thus, researchers seek to explain and exploit the human behavior implicit in the Web’s evolving structure.