The Web grows and evolves faster than we like and expect, imposing scalability and relevance problems to Web search engines. In this talk we present how mining Web data and usage logs allows to improve a search engine in several ways: page ranking, indexes and interfaces. As a corollary we show several interesting relations of different Web characteristics: structure, dynamics, "quality", etc. Our results help to understand not only technical issues, but also social ones, as the Web is the collaborative work of many people, a few publishing, and all of them querying.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is professor and chair of the CS department of the University of Chile. He is also director of the Center for Web Research, a project funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative.
He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from U. of Waterloo, Canada, 1989.  He has been president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) from 1992 until 1995, being elected again for 1997-98.
During 1993, he received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences. In 1994 he received the award to the best engineering research in the last 4 years from the Institute of Engineers of Chile. In 1997 with two Brazilian colleagues obtained the COMPAQ prize to the best Brazilian research article in CS.
He was elected to the IEEE CS Board of Governors for the period 2002-04. In 2002 he was appointed to the Chilean Academy of Sciences, being the first person from CS to achieve this position in Chile. His research interests include information retrieval, algorithms, and information visualization.  He is co-author of the book Modern Information Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992.

The Webby Awards® is the leading international award honoring excellence in Web design, functionality and creativity (http://www.webbyawards.com). More than just a popularity contest, the Webbys recognize outstanding achievement in content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience.
While attendees to this mini-tutorial cannot be guaranteed that their Web site will win a Webby award®, they will come away with valuable information regarding the latest design techniques and technologies for building successful sites. These techniques are generally applicable for sites serving diverse functions ? e-commerce, education, intranets, portals, etc. The criteria used by the Webbys will serve to guide the introduction of these techniques and examples of Webby nominees and winners will be used to demonstrate their application.

Bebo White is a Department Associate (retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the home of the first Web site in the U.S. He has been an active participant in the evolution of Web technology since 1991. Bebo is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) whose membership selects the winners of the Webby Awards®.