Web information retrieval is significantly more challenging than traditional well-controlled, small document collection information retrieval. One main difference between traditional information retrieval and Web information retrieval is the Web’s hyperlink structure. This structure has been exploited by several of today’s leading Web search engines, particularly Google and Teoma. In this survey paper, we focus on Web information retrieval methods that use eigenvector computations, presenting the three popular methods of HITS, PageRank, and SALSA.

Current search technologies work in a "one size fits all" fashion. Therefore, the answer to a query is independent of specific user information need. In this paper we describe a novel ranking technique for personalized search servicesthat combines content-based and community-based evidences. The community-based information is used in order to provide context for queries andis influenced by the current interaction of the user with the service. Ouralgorithm is evaluated using data derived from an actual service available on the Web an online bookstore. We show that the quality of content-based ranking strategies can be improved by the use of communityinformation as another evidential source of relevance. In our experiments the improvements reach up to 48% in terms of average precision.

<par>The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich source of information about the content of the environment, provided we have effective means for understanding it. We develop a set of algorithmic tools for extracting information from the link structures of such environments, and report on experiments that demonstrate their effectiveness in a variety of context on the World Wide Web. The central issue we address within our framework is the distillation of broad search topics, through the discovery of &ldquo;authorative&rdquo; information sources on such topics. We propose and test an algorithmic formulation of the notion of authority, based on the relationship between a set of relevant authoritative pages and the set of &ldquo;hub pages&rdquo; that join them together in the link structure. Our formulation has connections to the eigenvectors of certain matrices associated with the link graph; these connections in turn motivate additional heuristrics for link-based analysis.</par>

. The network structure of a hyperlinked environment can be a rich source of information about the content of the environment, provided we have effective means for understanding it. We develop a set of algorithmic tools for extracting information from the link structures of such environments, and report on experiments that demonstrate their effectiveness in a variety of contexts on the World Wide Web. The central issue we address within our framework is the distillation of broad search topics,...