World Wide Web Information Retrieval Using Web Connectivity Information

ii PROJECT ABSTRACT Gathering, processing and distributing information from the World Wide Web will be a vital technology for the next century. Web search techniques have played a critical role in the development of information systems. Due to the diverse nature of web documents, traditional search techniques must be improved. Hyperlink structure based methods have proved to be powerful ways of exploring the relationships between web documents. In this project, a prototype web search engine was developed to exploit the link structure of web documents, based on the use of the Companion algorithm. The prototype consists of a web spider, local database, and search software. The system was written using the Java programming language. Our spider crawls and downloads web pages using Lynx, then saves the hyperlinks into an Oracle database. JDBC is used to implement the database processing. Search software makes a vicinity graph for the query URL and returns the most related pages after calculating the hub and authority weights. Finally, HTML web pages provide user interfaces and communicate with CGI using the Perl language. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS