In this paper we propose a hierarchical clustering engine, called SnakeT, that is able to organize on-the-fly the search results drawn from 16 commodity search engines into a hierarchy of labeled folders. The hierarchy o#ers a complementary view to the flat-ranked list of results returned by current search engines. Users can navigate through the hierarchy driven by their search needs. This is especially useful for informative, polysemous and poor queries.

Abstract. Google’s success derives in large part from its PageRank algorithm, which ranks the importance of web pages according to an eigenvector of a weighted link matrix. Analysis of the PageRank formula provides a wonderful applied topic for a linear algebra course. Instructors may assign this article as a project to more advanced students or spend one or two lectures presenting the material with assigned homework from the exercises. This material also complements the discussion of Markov chains in matrix algebra. Maple and Mathematica files supporting this material can be found at www.rose-hulman.edu/∼bryan.

Abstract not found