Abstract – A crawler is a program that retrieves and stores pages from the Web, commonly for a Web search engine. A crawler often has to download hundreds of millions of pages in a short period of time and has to constantly monitor and refresh the downloaded pages. Once the crawler has downloaded a significant number of pages, it has to start revisiting the downloaded pages in order to refresh the downloaded collection. Due to resource constraints, search engines usually have difficulties keeping the entire local repository synchronized with the web. Given the size of web today and inherent resource constraints: re-crawling too frequently leads to wasted bandwidth, re-crawling too infrequently brings down the quality of the search engine. In this paper a hybrid approach is build on the basis of which a web crawler maintains the retrieved pages “fresh” in the local collection. Towards this goal the concept of Page rank and Age of a web page is used. As higher page rank means that more number of users are visiting that very web page and that page has higher link popularity. Age of web page is a measure that indicates how outdated the local copy is. Using these two parameters a hybrid approach is proposed that can identify important pages at the early stage of a crawl, and the crawler re-visit these important pages with higher priority.

Index Terms – Revisit Policy, Search Engines, Web Crawler

Cite: Vipul Sharma, Mukesh Kumar, and Renu Vig, "A Hybrid Revisit Policy For Web Search," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 36-47, February, 2012.doi:10.4304/jait.3.1.36-47