Selective hypertext induced topic search

We address the problem of answering broad-topic queries on the World Wide Web. We present a link based analysis al-gorithm SelHITS, which is an improvement over Kleinberg's HITS [2] algorithm. We introduce the concept of virtual links to exploit the latent information in the hyperlinked environment. We propose a novel approach to calculate hub and authority values. We also present a selective expan-sion method which avoids topic drift and provides results consistent with only one interpretation of the query, even if the query is ambiguous. Initial experimental evaluation and user feedback show that our algorithm indeed distills the most important and relevant pages for broad-topic queries. We also infer that there exists a uniform notion of quality of search results within users.