Stories by Members of the Clever Project

THE CLEVER PROJECT: Soumen Chakrabarti, Byron Dom, S. Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan and Andrew Tomkins are research staff members at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. Jon M. Kleinberg is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Cornell University. David Gibson is completing his Ph.D. at the computer science division at the University of California, Berkeley.

The authors began their quest for exploiting the hyperlink structure of the World Wide Web three years ago, when they first sought to develop improved techniques for finding information in the clutter of cyberspace. Their work originated with the following question: If computation were not a bottleneck, what would be the most effective search algorithm? In other words, could they build a better search engine if the processing didn't have to be instantaneous? The result was the algorithm described in this article. Recently the research team has been investigating the Web phenomenon of cybercommunities.