APPLYING AN INFORMATION GATHERING ARCHITECTURE TO NETFIND - A WHITE PAGES TOOL FOR A CHANGING AND GROWING INTERNET

The Internet is quickly becoming an indispensable means of communicati on and collaboration, based on applications such as electronic mail, r emote information retrieval, and multimedia conferencing. A fundamenta l problem for such applications is supporting resource discovery in a fashion that keeps pace with the Internet's exponential growth in size and diversity. Netfind is a scalable tool that locates current electr onic mail addresses and other information about Internet users. Since the time we first deployed Netfind in 1990, it has evolved considerabl y, making use of more types of information sources, as well as more so phisticated mechanisms to gather and cross-correlate information. In t his paper we describe these techniques, and present a general framewor k for gathering and harnessing widely distributed information in a div erse and growing internet environment. At present Netfind gathers info rmation from 17 different types of sources, providing a particularly t horough demonstration of an information gathering architecture.