Michael Evans

• University of Reading

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the most popular techniques used to rank a web page highly in Google. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the results of a study into 50 highly optimized web pages that were created as part of a Search Engine Optimization competition. The study focuses on the most popular techniques that...

Search has become a hot topic in Internet computing, with rival search engines battling to become the de facto Web portal, harnessing search algorithms to wade through information on a scale undreamed of by early information retrieval (IR) pioneers. This article examines how search has matured from its roots in specialized IR systems to become a ke...

The Web's link structure (termed the Web Graph) is a richly connected set of Web pages. Current applications use this graph for indexing and information retrieval purposes. In contrast the relationship between Web Graph and application is reversed by letting the structure of the Web Graph influence the behaviour of an application. Presents a novel...

Search Engines exploit the Web's hyperlink structure to help infer information content. The new phenomenon of personal Web logs, or 'blogs', encourage more extensive annotation of Web content. If their resulting link structures bias the Web crawling applica- tions that search engines depend upon, there are implications for another form of annotatio...

Web resource usage statistics enable server owners to monitor how their users use their Web sites. However, such statistics are only compiled for individual servers. If resource usage was monitored across the whole Web, the changing interests of society would be revealed, and deep insights made into the changing nature of the Web. However, capturin...

We describe an initiative under way at Warwick to provide a technical foundation for computer-aided learning and computer-assisted assessment tools, which allows a rich dialogue sensitive to individual students' response patterns. The system distinguishes between dialogues for individual problems and the linking of problems. This enables a subject...

The web's hyperlinks are notoriously brittle, and break whenever a resource migrates. One solution to this problem is a transparent resource migration mechanism, which separates a resource's location from its identity, and helps provide referential integrity. However, although several such mechanisms have been designed, they have not been widely ad...

The architecture of the World-Wide Web has scaled beyond its original expectations, but problems are now emerging that could undermine its effectiveness as an information system, and restrict its future growth. Nearly 30% of all web pages experience link rot, Domain Name System (DNS) domain names are rapidly running out, and older web pages are del...

The paper explains the background to experimental work that was conducted with the aim of measuring aspects of the WWW (specifically the average lifetime of a web link and the impact of the “Millennium Bug”), but which inadvertently caused two perceived security breaches on remote systems. The paper explains the nature of these incidents and consid...

The World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth as a content delivery mechanism, delivering hypertext files and static media content in a standardised way. However, this content has been unable to interact with other content, making the Web a distribution system rather than a distributed system. This is changing, however, as distributed compone...

The 1990s have witnessed significant growth in both the use and capabilities of mobile telecommunications technologies. Furthermore, technological convergence is now beginning to occur in terms of integrating mobile and fixed technologies into a unified architecture for telecommunications services. The design of such a service architecture has been...

In addressing the move in the telecommunications field toward Integrated Service Engineering, the paper introduces the concept of resource adaptation in a service environment. The relationship between Resource Adapter, Service Node and Service Machine is examined, along with the role of RM-ODP viewpoints in the identification and development of Res...

We present a novel web crawling agent, the heuristics of which are orthogonally coupled to the enemy generation strategy of a computer game. Input from the player of the computer game provides genuine randomness to the web crawling agent, effectively driving a random walk across the web. The random walk, in turn, uses the structure of the Web Graph...