Exploiting hyperlinks for automatic information discovery on the WWW

The explosion of the World Wide Web as a global information network brings with it a number of related challenges for information retrieval and automation. The link structure, which is the main feature of the hypermedia environment, can be a rich source of information for exploration. This paper is centered around the exploitation of hyperlinks in the subject of automatic discovery. The paper discusses the design of site traversal algorithms and identifies some important parameters for hyperlink-based information discovery on the Web. Meanwhile, it proposes a new evaluation method, the search depth, for comparing various hyperlink traversal algorithms