Structural Web Search Using a Graph-Based Discovery System

Accessing information of interest on the Internet presents a challenge to scientists and analysts, particularly if the desired information is structural in nature. Our goal is to design a structural search engine which uses the hyperlink structure of the Web, in addition to textual information, to search for sites of interest. To design a structural search engine, we use the SUBDUE graph-based discovery tool. The tool, called WebSUBDUE, is enhanced by WordNet features that allow the engine to search for synonym terms. Our search engine retrieves sites corresponding to structures formed by graph-based user queries. We demonstrate the approach on a number of structural web queries.