Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)
Jon M. Kleinberg
The problem of searching for information in networks like the World Wide Web can be approached in a variety of ways, ranging from centralized indexing schemes to decentralized mechanisms that navigate the underlying network without knowledge of its global structure. The decentralized approach appears in a variety of settings: in the behavior of users browsing the Web by following hyperlinks; in the design of
focused crawlers [4, 5, 8] and other agents that explore the Web's links to gather information; and in the search protocols underlying decentralized peer-to-peer sys- tems such as Gnutella [10], Freenet [7], and recent research prototypes [21, 22, 23], through which users can share resources without a central server.