Abstract

<par>The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich source of information 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 context on the World Wide Web. The central issue we address within our framework is the distillation of broad search topics, through the discovery of &ldquo;authorative&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;hub pages&rdquo; 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 heuristrics for link-based analysis.</par>

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