The Laboratory for Web Algorithmics (LAW) was established in 2002 at the Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Informazione (DSI) of the Università degli studi di Milano.

Research at LAW concerns all algorithmic aspects of the web. More in detail:

UbiCrawler is a scalable, fault-tolerant and fully distributed web crawler developed in collaboration with the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica. The first report on the design of UbiCrawler won the Best Poster Award at the Tenth World Wide Web Conference.

Once a part of the web has been crawled, the resulting graph is very large—you need a compact representation. WebGraph is a framework built to this purpose. Among other things, WebGraph uses new instantaneous codes for the integers and new aggressive algorithmic compression techniques.

Web graphs have special properties whose study requires a sizeable amount of mathematics, but also a careful study of actual web graphs. We have studied, for instance, the paradoxical way PageRank evolves during a crawl, and the way PageRank changes depending on the damping factor.

Often, the purpose of a crawl is the contruction of a full-text index of the text contained in the crawled pages. Such an index is at the basis of all existing commercial search engines such as Google.

The research of search-engine construction is based on MG4J, a system for full-text indexing of large-scale document collections.