Web structure mining: an introduction

Due to the increasing amount of data available online, the World Wide Web has becoming one of the most valuable resources for information retrievals and knowledge discoveries. Web mining technologies are the right solutions for knowledge discovery on the Web. The knowledge extracted from the Web can be used to raise the performances for Web information retrievals, question answering, and Web based data warehousing. In this paper, we provide an introduction of Web mining as well as a review of the Web mining categories. Then we focus on one of these categories: the Web structure mining. Within this category, we introduce link mining and review two popular methods applied in Web structure mining: HITS and PageRank.