Focused Browsing: Providing Topical Feedback for Link Selection in Hypertext Browsing

Abstract

Abstract. When making decisions about whether to navigate to a linked page, users of standard browsers of hypertextual documents returned by an information retrieval search engine are entirely reliant on the content of the anchortext associated with links and the surrounding text. This information is often insufficient for them to make reliable decisions about whether to open a linked page, and they can find themselves following many links to pages which are not helpful with subsequent return to the previous page. We describe a prototype focusing browsing application which provides feedback on the likely usefulness of each page linked from the current one, and a term cloud preview of the contents of each linked page. Results from an exploratory experiment suggest that users can find this useful in improving their search efficiency.

A Fascinating and Dynamic Analysis of a Url Based Web Service to Generate Insightful Thumbnails for Links

“…Generating more useful preview content Jones [9] defined a surfing utility that extracted and displayed a term cloud of the webpage content, as a extra beneficial answer than regular previews. This work extracted static, if more useful, content from the web site and had no reference to the consumer's present day hobby.…”