THE HIDDEN WEB

The difficulty of finding information on the World Wide Web by browsin g hypertext documents has led to the development and deployment of var ious search engines and indexing techniques. However, many information -gathering tasks are better handled by finding a referral to a human e xpert rather than by simply interacting with online information source s. A personal referral allows a user to judge the quality of the infor mation he or she is receiving as well as to potentially obtain informa tion that is deliberately not made public. The process of finding an e xpert who is both reliable and likely to respond to the user can be vi ewed as a search through the network of social relationships between i ndividuals as opposed to a search through the network of hypertext doc uments. The goal of the REFERRAL WEB Project is to create models of so cial networks by data mining the web and develop tools that use the mo dels to assist in locating experts and related information search and evaluation tasks.