Effective Resource Discovery on the World Wide Web

$EVWUDFW The world-wide web grows at alarming rates, making information retrieval an increasingly difficult process. Traditional search methods based on search-engines usually flood the users with an overwhelming number of URLs. If a user wants to stay up-to-date on some issue and (s)he repeatedly queries the above search engines, (s)he will be repeatedly flooded with (almost) the same set of URLs, out of which only a small percentage will point to new, previously unseen documents. In this paper, we present USEwebNET, a resource discovery tool built on top of traditional search engines. USEwebNET registers each user's interests and repeatedly queries several search engines for URLs matching a user's registered interests. USEwebNET keeps track of which URLs have been visited by each user. Thus, when a user invokes USEwebNET, (s)he is presented only with new or "unvisited" URLs. We view USEwebNET as a value-added service on top of existing search engines and information providers, which helps users effectively find "what's new" in the rapidly evolving web of our world.