From information retrieval to hypertext linking

Abstract

There is a plethora of approaches to retrieval. At one extreme is a web search engine, which provides the user with complete freedom to search a collection of perhaps over a billion documents. At the opposite extreme is a web page where the author has supplied a small number of links to outside documents, chosen in advance by the author. Many practical retrieval needs lie between these two extremes. This paper aims to look at the multi-dimensional spectrum of retrieval methods; at the end, it presents some hypothetical tools, hopefully blueprints to the future, that aim to cover wider parts of the spectrum than current tools do.