It's essentially a link analysis algorithm totaling how many times has a given page been back-linked.
But Dr. Chen insists Coplink is not just link analysis.
By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis.
WiseNut was also designed to capitalize on what its developers considered a serious weaknesses in Google's system of link analysis: its potential for manipulation.
The community of interest data sought by the F.B.I. is central to a data-mining technique intelligence officials call link analysis.
But privacy advocates, civil rights leaders and even some counterterrorism officials warn that link analysis can be misused to establish tenuous links to people who have no real connection to terrorism but may be drawn into an investigation nonetheless.
Using a patent-pending process of link analysis, Google's technology gives a numerical rank to Web pages based on the number of times those pages are linked from an authoritative Web site.
But it could permit what intelligence analysts and commercial data miners refer to as "link analysis," a statistical technique for investigators to identify calling patterns in a seemingly impenetrable mountain of digital data.
For the past decade or so, many researchers have used link analysis to figure out how information spreads, said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor at Berkman who has been involved in creating Media Cloud.
