From: Matt Zeidenberg (zeidenbe@SSC.WISC.EDU)
Date: Fri Dec 24 1999 - 18:39:26 PST
We have developed a new Charles Dickens portal web page. It has links to hundreds of pages. Please check it out! Thanks. The address is: http://www.active-portal.com/dickens/ This page has been developed as part of the Active Portal Project in the Computer Science Dept at the University of Wisconsin, an ongoing research project. An active portal is a page devoted to a particular topic (in this case, Charles Dickens) but with a difference. The active portal is manually seeded with a number of a pages known to be about a topic. A search agent then learns the characteristics of those pages and then seeks out similar pages. This search agent runs automatically and continuously. Thus the active portal, unlike manually-compiled portals like Yahoo, continually discovers new pages about a topic. In addition, it ranks a page based on how many other pages also about that topic point to it. Thus, new pages web move to the top of the list as they are discovered and more and more people link to them. Please feel free to reply to this message with any comments. Best regards, Matt Zeidenberg University of Wisconsin Computer Science Dept.