Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment

The link structure of a hypermedia environment can be a rich source of information about the content of the environment, provided we have effective means for understanding it. Versions of this principle have been studied in the hypertext research community and (in a context predating hypermedia) through journal citation analysis in the field of bibliometrics. But for the problem of searching in hyperlinked environments such as the World Wide Web, it is clear from the prevalent techniques that the information inherent in the links has yet to be fully exploited. In this work we develop a new method for automatically extracting certain types of information about a hypermedia environment from its link structure, and we report on experiments that demonstrate its effectiveness for a variety of search problems on the www. The central problem we consider is that of determining the relative "authority" of pages in such environments. This issue is central to a number of basic hypertext search t..