Hypersearching the Web; June 1999; Scientific American Magazine; by Members of the "Clever" Project; 7 Page(s)

Every day the World Wide Web grows by roughly a million electronic pages, adding to the hundreds of millions already on-line. This staggering volume of information is loosely held together by more than a billion annotated connections, called hyperlinks. For the first time in history, millions of people have virtually instant access from their homes and offices to the creative output of a significant-and growing-fraction of the planet's population.

But because of the Web's rapid, chaotic growth, the resulting network of information lacks organization and structure. In fact, the Web has evolved into a global mess of previously unimagined proportions. Web pages can be written in any language, dialect or style by individuals with any background, education, culture, interest and motivation. Each page might range from a few characters to a few hundred thousand, containing truth, falsehood, wisdom, propaganda or sheer nonsense. How, then, can one extract from this digital morass high-quality, relevant pages in response to a specific need for certain information?