THE QUEST FOR CORRECT INFORMATION ON THE WEB - HYPER SEARCH ENGINES

Finding the right information in the World Wide Web is becoming a fund amental problem, since the amount of global information that the WWW c ontains is growing at an incredible rate. In this paper, we present a novel method to extract from a web object its ''hyper'' informative co ntent, in contrast with current search engines, which only deal with t he ''textual'' informative content. This method is not only valuable p er se, but it is shown to be able to considerably increase the precisi on of current search engines, Moreover, it integrates smoothly with ex isting search engines technology since it can be implemented on top of every search engine, acting as a post-processor, thus automatically t ransforming a search engine into its corresponding ''hyper'' version. We also show how, interestingly, the hyper information can be usefully employed to face the search engines persuasion problem. (C) 1997 Publ ished by Elsevier Science B.V.