The information we deal with is taking on an increasingly networked character. In part, this is because we now have the resources to represent and index gigantic link structures -- the citations among all technical patents and the graph of all phone calls made in the U.S. are two examples. But networked content is also being created at a phenomenal rate; although the World Wide Web as we know it is only seven years old, it is already being hailed as a new medium.

These developments have led to a host of new algorithmic challenges. They range from analyzing the link structures of environments such as the Web to modeling the social processes that shape the evolution of large network structures, both real and virtual. We will consider these issues in several different settings, illustrating how an algorithmic perspective can help us frame fundamentally new questions in studying complex networks.