The quest for correct information on the Web: Hyper search engines

Finding the right information in the World Wide Web is becoming a fundamental problem, since the amount of global information that the WWW contains is growing at an incredible rate. In this paper, we present a novel method to extract from a web object its ''hyper'' informative content, in contrast with current search engines, which only deal with the ''textual'' informative content. This method is not only valuable per se, but it is shown to be able to considerably increase the precision of current search engines, Moreover, it integrates smoothly with existing search engines technology since it can be implemented on top of every search engine, acting as a post-processor, thus automatically transforming a search engine into its corresponding ''hyper'' version. We also show how, interestingly, the hyper information can be usefully employed to face the search engines persuasion problem. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.