WebWatch: What's Related To My Web Site?

Brian Kelly     b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk     (UK Web Focus UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY)

Ariadne 2001
(ReLIS:doi:doiari:y:2001:i:27:p:17)

Abstract:

What's Related is a feature of Netscape Communicator that is designed to "help you figure out where to go next when you're surfing the web or drilling for information". By clicking on the icon ion the toolbar you can see sites that provides information or offers products and services that are similar or connected to those offered by the site that you're currently viewing. You can go directly to a related site by selecting one of the links in the drop-down menu, or select the Detailed List to see a web page with a list of related sites.The What's Related data is created by Alexa Internet. Alexa uses crawls the Web to create and categorise related Web sites for millions of web URLs. Alexa uses links on the crawled pages to find related sites. The day-to-day use of What's Related also helps build and refine the data. As the service is used the requested URLs are logged. By looking at high-level trends, Netscape and Alexa can deduce relationships between Web sites. For example, if thousands of users go directly from site A to site B, the two sites are likely to be related.

Note: In this issue's WebWatch column Brian Kelly looks at Netscape's What's Related facility and reports on the service's findings for institutional Web servers.
Month: 23-March-2001
Year: 2001

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