Introduces several new versions of PageRank (the link based Web page ranking algorithm), based on an information science perspective on the concept of the Web document. Although the Web page is the typical indivisible unit of information in search engine results and most Web information...

There has been much recent interest in extracting information from collections of Web links. One tool that has been used is Ingwersen’s Web impact factor. It has been demonstrated that several versions of this metric can produce results that correlate with research ratings of British...

Google's PageRank is an influential algorithm that uses a model of Web use that is dominated by its link structure in order to rank pages by their estimated value to the Web community. This paper reports on the outcome of applying the algorithm to the Web sites of three national university...

A layered approach for identifying communities in the Web is presented and explored by applying the flake exact community identification algorithm to the UK academic Web. Although community or topic identification is a common task in information retrieval, a new perspective is developed by: the...

Purpose – This paper seeks to address the question: do university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year or do these change over time? Design/methodology/approach – A link classification exercise is used to identify temporal changes in...

The spread of subject gateway sites can have an impact on the other major Web information retrieval tool: the commercial search engine. This is because gateway sites perturb the link structure of the Web, something used to rank matches in search engine results pages. The success of Google means...

Google is a highly regarded and widely used search engine, particularly in academia. In this short note we comment on its remarkable ability to find journal Web sites, using a case study of law.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the capabilities and limitations of weblog search engines. Design/methodology/approach – The features of a range of current blog search engines are described. These are then discussed and illustrated with examples that illustrate the...