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Content

The goal of information retrieval is to find all documents relevant for a user query in a collection of documents. Decades of research in information retrieval were successful in developing and refining techniques that are solely word-based (see e.g., [2]). With the advent of the web new sources of information became available, one of them being the hyperlinks between documents and records of user behavior. To be precise, hypertexts (i.e., collections of documents connected by hyperlinks) have existed and have been studied for a long time. What was new was the large number of hyperlinks created by independent individuals. Hyperlinks provide a valuable source of information for web information retrieval as we will show in this article. This area of information retrieval is commonly called link analysis. Why would one expect hyperlinks to be useful? Ahyperlink is a reference of a web page B that is contained in a web page A. When the hyperlink is clicked on in a web browser, the browser displays page B. This functionality alone is not helpful for web information retrieval. However, the way hyperlinks are typically used by authors of web pages can give them valuable information content. Typically, authors create links because they think they will be useful for the readers of the pages. Thus, links are usually either navigational aids that, for example, bring the reader back to the homepage of the site, or links that point to pages whose content augments the content of the current page. The second kind of links tend to point to high-quality pages that might be on the same topic as the page containing the link.

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Content

Information retrieval is a computer science subfield whose goal is to find all documents relevant to a user query in a given collection of documents. As such, information retrieval should really be called document retrieval. Before the advent of the Web, IR systems were typically installed in libraries for use mostly by reference librarians. The retrieval algorithm for these systems was usually based exclusively on analysis of the words in the document. The Web changed all this. Now each Web user has access to various search engines whose retrieval algorithms often use not only the words in the documents but also information like the hyperlink structure of the Web or markup language tags. How are hyperlinks useful? The hyperlink functionality alone-that is, the hyperlink to Web page B that is contained in Web page A-is not directly useful in information retrieval. However, the way Web page authors use hyperlinks can give them valuable information content. Authors usually create hyperlinks they think will be useful to readers. Some may be navigational aids that, for example, take the reader back to the site's home page; others provide access to documents that augment the content of the current page. The latter tend to point to highquality pages that might be on the same topic as the page containing the hyperlink. Web information retrieval systems can exploit this information to refine searches for relevant documents. Hyperlink analysis significantly improves the relevance of the search results, so much so that all major Web search engines claim to use some type of hyperlink analysis. However, the search engines do not disclose details about the type of hyperlink analysis they perform- mostly to avoid manipulation of search results by Web-positioning companies. In this article, I discuss how hyperlink analysis can be applied to ranking algorithms, and survey other ways Web search engines can use this analysis.