Supporting Web Search and Navigation by an Overlay Linking Structure

Search and navigation in hyperlinked networks have been subjects of research since the Internet emerged. Due to its incompleteness in terms of linking related content, the existing linking structure of the Web and similar networks cannot be utilized as a searchable index without prior application of suitable crawling strategies and relevance determination. Following the example of sitemaps, a map-like extension to the network's existing linking structure is proposed. For this, a concept and algorithms are devised to generate contextual cluster files and create links among them. The resulting WebMap covers all searchable resources on the original network in a contextual overlay network.