IBM's Clever search technology can do more than simply hunt down useful Web sites. Another application of link analysis makes it possible to identify online special-interest communities as they form, and to track their evolution. This is the intent of a process called trawling developed at IBM's Almaden Research Center. Such a tool could find a range of uses, including finely targeted marketing.
Communities arise as a result of shared interests.
For example, a person in New York might create a Web page about Georgian coffee tables. Someone in Latvia might do likewise. Chances are, the two enthusiasts will list hyperlinks to many of the same sites. We believe that our technique would allow us to discover a Georgian coffee-table community even before the New Yorker and the Latvian knew that one was forming. Trawling works by sifting through data uncovered by a Web crawler, a program that finds Web pages and their network of links.