Abstract: A system and method are provided to accessing a set of web pages within a context. The set of web pages may be represented using a graph comprising a set of nodes and a set of edges. First and second probability distributions may be generated over a set of nodes of the graph using a first algorithm to indicate a measure of closeness among the set of web pages. A characterization may be determined with respect to context for a web page from a second subset of web pages based on the first and second probability distributions. An indication of the characterization of the web page from the second subset of web pages may be outputted.

Abstract: An improved system and method is provided for characterizing a web page using multiple anchor sets of web pages. To do so, web pages in a collection of unknown web pages may be characterized using known anchor sets of web pages with different characterizations that may be linked to the collection of unknown web pages. A direction and method may be selected for propagating a probability distribution between vertices of a graph representing the collection of web pages and vertices of the anchor sets representing the anchor sets of web pages. Methods for propagating the probability distribution in a forward, backward or bidirectional direction are provided. Various quality measures of the characterization of the vertices are provided using the propagated probability distribution. These various quality measures may be paired and combined in different ways to provide a characterization of the vertices representing the unknown web pages.