ABSTRACT
The Web is vast and growing exuberantly. At a recent count, it had over a billion pages and it continues to grow at the rate of at least a million pages a day.2 (It is characteristic of the Web that these statistics, as you read them, are already far out of date.) There is an amazing amount of useful information on the Web but it is getting harder and harder to find. The problem arises from the way information is organized (or, better, disorganized) on the Web. The way the Web works, each element of this welter of information is linked to many other elements by hyperlinks. Such links can link any element of information to any other element for any reason that happens to occur to whoever is making the link. No authority or agreed-upon catalogue system constrains the linker’s associations.3
