Abstract:

The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich source of in-
formation about the content of the environment, provided we have effective means for
understanding it. We develop a set of algorithmic tools for extracting information from
the link structures of such environments, and report on experiments that demonstrate
their effectiveness in a variety of contexts on the World Wide Web. The central issue
we address within our framework is the distillation of broad search topics, through
the discovery of "authoritative" information sources on such topics. We propose and
test an algorithmic formulation of the notion of authority, based on the relationship
between a set of relevant authoritative pages and the set of \hub pages" that join them
together in the link structure. Our formulation has connections to the eigenvectors
of certain matrices associated with the link graph; these connections in turn motivate
additional heuristics for link-based analysis.