Information Exploration on the World Wide Web

Publisher Summary Over the past 10 years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has grown exponentially. Commercial sites such as Lycos, Alta Vista, Web Crawler, and many others are search engines that help web users find information on the web. These commercial sites use indexing software agents to index as much of the web as possible. Currently, the web is indexed mainly on its visible information: headings, subheadings, titles, images, metadata, and text. Information retrieval from indexes is usually via one of the search engines, where submission of keywords as a query returns a list of web resources related to the query. A search engine can still easily return a large number of webpages for a single search and it is time consuming for the user to go through the list of pages just to find the information. To address this problem, advanced information exploration with data-mining capacities is a direction for research and development. This chapter introduces the two most popular web browsers: Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer, and also some leading search engines. It also reviews some research efforts on advanced web-information exploration using data-mining facilities.