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Best of the Bots Tap Into Collective Knowledge By Don Barker
Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com) has rocketed into the news recently because of an announcement of a strategic relationship with Netscape Communications. Netscape will include a "What’s Related" button in future versions of Netscape Communicator that uses Alexa’s Related Links technology to provide a list of sites related to the current page displayed in your browser. Alexa’s free Web navigation service is not based on conventional keyword searches or simple category look-ups, both of which have become increasingly ineffective as the Web has grown in size. Alexa Internet, founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, harnesses the collective wisdom and experiences of the entire Internet community to make recommendations on related sites. Alexa maintains a multi-terabyte central database that stores both the behavioral patterns of Web travelers and categorical information about the actual content on the Web, the latter of which surfaces Site Statistics about any page on the Web. Related Links are generated using sophisticated data mining techniques along with intelligent technologies, both of which identify usage patterns and the relationships between the pages, based on common hypertext links and similarities in textual content. In determining Related Links, Alexa also takes into consideration recommendations made by users. If a user’s suggestions are supported by Alexa’s usage patterns or the analysis of page content, then they are added to the service. Since this method of associating similar pages is highly time-consuming, the company is concentrating its efforts in collecting user input on the top 10,000 Web sites. Although a number of community, or collaborative, filtering systems are available to assist you in contextually navigating the Web, Alexa goes well beyond these offerings in terms of both scope and approach. According to Cynthia Lohr, the Public Relations Manager at Internet Alexa, users of Netscape’s What’s Related feature will benefit from, and automatically contribute to, the online experiences of a community of hundreds of thousands, enabling them to more readily find relevant information. Of course, these users will also enjoy the extensive statistical analysis of the Web, and selected recommendations, which are already a part of Alexa’s Related Link service. For example, if you visit the home of BotSpot, at http://www.botspot.com, and click the What’s Related button in the Preview Release 1 of Netscape Communicator 4.5, you’ll be presented with a list of ten related sites, as shown in Figure 1. Selecting one of these sites, like Tim Finn’s page on Software Agents, automatically loads the page in the browser, as illustrated in Figure 2.
This conceptual approach to navigating the Web has some significant advantages over using a search engine. Even with the advent of metasearch engines (i.e., tools that let you query multiple search engines simultaneously), finding relevant information in the vastness of cyberspace has become a truly daunting task. Now you have traveling companion that can continually recommend related sites so you don’t have "…to boldly go where no one has gone before."
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Choosing What’s Related once more displays another list of
10 relevant pages, as shown on the right. You can continue to take this "most
traveled path" across the Web for along as you like. Each new page will turn up a
slightly different set of associated sites to explore. 
