Here’s the first paragraph of the dissertation:

“The World Wide Web, or the Web, is a network of interconnected sites andhyperlinks between them. New structures can be added to this web bycreating hyperlinks that have a source and a target. There are no regulationsor quality control and links can be created to target any Web sites. Without any control of the hyperlinking the Web could get very tangled, chaotic even,but could there still be some structure in the chaos? Could hyperlinks reflectsome offline phenomenon? Webometrics is a research field that tries toanswer these questions among others and tries to find patterns and structuresin the anarchy of hyperlinking on the World Wide Web.”