<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Friday, November 21, 2003  

Mathing the Internet
http://www.econtentinstitute.org/issues/ISarticle.asp?id=142271&story_id=191739114443&issue=11012003&PC

Move over, Google, say mathematicians working to crack some of the algorithms that deliver too many or too few Internet search results: The competition is heating up. In fact, one researcher uses that thermodynamic concept to describe how her group's project works. "Our focused crawler is based on the interplay between the links and the text. I like to describe it like the child's game. You've hidden something and you tell people they are getting closer -- hotter and hotter or colder and colder," says Dr. Jeannette Janssen, of Canada's Dalhousie University. This crawler would observe a user's behavior, analyze it, and use that knowledge to search for pages the user would likely be interested in. If, for example, a user is interested in computer science conferences, there's often a link to a conference on a college professor's home page, which is connected to a computer science department page, which is connected to a university page. If the crawler lands on a university Web page, even though none of the keywords are on that page, it would know it's getting closer to relevant content. Users also can "train" the browser by clicking a button on pages of interest.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 8:54 AM
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