Toward an interactive internet search engine

Abstract

This thesis uses the HITS algorithm as a basis to propose an interactive internet search engine. With the Web becoming a major source of information for many users, it became a necessity to be able to search the Web efficiently. The main problem resides with broad topic queries. These are queries for which a typical text-based search engine like AltaVista would return thousands of pages. A remedy for these situations was proposed by Kleinberg in his 1-IITS algorithm in which he uses the hyperlink structure of the Web as a major source of information about the contents of the Web. In this thesis, we experiment with the HITS algorithm using the keyword "cancer" as a broad topic. We report on the performance of HITS for different parameter values. The main contribution of this thesis is an attempt to create an interactive search engine that allows the user to specify the rank of each page in the root set. Our results show a significant improvement over the results reported by HITS.