Fig. 2.

The average fitness value (as measured by the growth exponent) plotted as a function of the initial in-degree (or experience) of pages. The set of pages considered consists of those with measurable fitness (see Results for a definition of such pages). As the plot shows, pages with low initial in-degree have higher average fitness, even though the distribution is always exponential; moreover, the average fitness decreases as a power law form k^−0.4 until ≈k = 100 and then levels off to a constant value. Thus, the web on the average gives a slight fitness boost to the pages with low experience but then treats them statistically the same once they have experience above a certain value.