Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Web graphs in the real world – dealing with dead ends

The preceding formula for calculating PageRank scores assumes that all the pages link to at least one page. In real life, this is not always the case! Let's consider the graph shown in the following diagram. Here, all the vertices are connected to each other with the exception of vertex D, which has incoming links but no outgoing links. In other words, D is a dead end!

Figure 4: An example graph where vertex D is a dead end

Would the presence of dead ends in the input graph cause problems with our PageRank score calculations? So far, we know that at each iteration of the PageRank algorithm, ...