Inferring Web communities from link topology

The World Wide Web grows through a decentralized, almost anarchic process, and this has resulted in a large hyperlinked corpus without the kind of logical organization that can be built into more tradit,ionally-created hypermedia. To extract, meaningful structure under such circumstances, we develop a notion of hyperlinked communities on the www t,hrough an analysis of the link topology. By invoking a simple, mathematically clean method for defining and exposing the structure of these communities, we are able to derive a number of themes: The communities can be viewed as containing a core of central, “authoritative” pages linked togh and they exhibit a natural type of hierarchical topic generalization that can be inferred directly from the pat,t,ern of linkage. Our investigation shows that although the process by which users of the Web create pages and links is very difficult to understand at a “local” level, it results in a much greater degree of orderly high-level structure than has typically been assumed.