Knowledge Organization on the Web: The Emergent Role of Social Classification

Abstract

There are close to a billion websites on the Internet with approximately 400 million users worldwide [www.internetworldstats.com]. People go to websites for a wide variety of different information tasks, from finding a restaurant to serious research. Many of the difficulties with searching the Web, as it is structured currently, can be attributed to increases to scale. The content of the Web is now so large that we only have a rough estimate of the number of sites and the range of information is extremely diverse, from blogs and photos to research articles and news videos.