Abstract

This paper proposes a method for discovering Web communities. A complete bipartite graph K i, j of Web pages can be regarded as a community sharing a common interest. Discovery of such community is expected to assist users’ information retrieval from the Web. The method proposed in this paper is based on the assumption that hyperlinks to related Web pages often co-occur. Relations of Web pages are detected by the co-occurrence of hyperlinks on the pages which are acquired from a search engine by backlink search. In order to find a new member of a Web community, all the hyperlinks contained in the acquired pages are extracted. A page which is pointed by the most frequent hyperlinks is regarded as a new member of the community. We have build a system which discovers complete bipartite graphs based on the method. Only from a few URLs of initial community members, the system succeeds in discovering several genres of Web communities without analyzing the contents of Web pages.