Abstract: A method of grouping nodes within a distributed network is provided. The example method includes performing a leader node self determination operation by which each node within the distributed network determines whether to become a leader node or a non-leader node, each leader node being the leader of a group including at least one node. Next, requests are sent, from each leader node, requesting at least one non-leader node to join the group associated with the leader node. First received requests are accepted, at each non-leader node, such that accepting non-leader nodes transition from a non-leader node to a dependent node dependent upon the requesting leader node. A next set of requests are sent, from each remaining non-leader node, requesting to join the group associated with at least one leader node. A determination is made, at each requested leader node, as to whether to accept the non-leader node into the group associated with the requested leader node.

Abstract: A method of grouping nodes within a distributed network is provided. The example method includes performing a leader node self determination operation by which each node within the distributed network determines whether to become a leader node or a non-leader node, each leader node being the leader of a group including at least one node. Next, requests are sent, from each leader node, requesting at least one non-leader node to join the group associated with the leader node. First received requests are accepted, at each non-leader node, such that accepting non-leader nodes transition from a non-leader node to a dependent node dependent upon the requesting leader node. A next set of requests are sent, from each remaining non-leader node, requesting to join the group associated with at least one leader node. A determination is made, at each requested leader node, as to whether to accept the non-leader node into the group associated with the requested leader node.

Abstract: The World Wide Web (WWW) can be modelled as a labelled directed graph G(V,E,L), in which V is the set of nodes, E is the set of edges, and L is a label function that maps edges to labels. This model, when applied to the WWW, indicates that V is a set of hypertext documents or objects, E is a set of hyperlinks connecting the documents in V, and the edge-label function represents the anchor-text corresponding to the hyperlinks. One can find a probabilistic ranking of the nodes for any given label, a ranking of the labels for any given node, and rankings of labels and pages using flow based models. Further, the flows can be computing using sparse matrix operations.