Selective approach to handling topic oriented tasks on the World Wide Web

We address the problem of handling topic oriented tasks on the World Wide Web. Our aim is to find most relevant and important pages for broad-topic queries while searching in a small set of candidate pages. We present a link analysis based algorithm SelHITS which is an improvement over Kleinberg's HITS algorithm. We introduce concept of virtual links to exploit latent information in the hyperlinked environment. Selective expansion of the root set and novel ranking strategy are the distinguishing features of our approach. Selective expansion method avoids topic drift and provides results consistent with only one interpretation of the query. Experimental evaluation and user feedback show that our algorithm indeed distills the most relevant and important pages for broad-topic queries. Trends in user feedback suggests that there exists a uniform notion of quality of search results within users.