MS WebScout: Web Navigation Aid and Personal Web History Explorer

摘要

WebScout is a prototype application that creates a complete archive of Web pages accessed by the user and a rich record of the user navigation, including the user and system annotations of seen or previewed pages. In addition, WebScout enhances the Browser with 1 the natural language processing of text and image analysis, 2 indexing and search capabilities for text and images, and 3 a module for creating visual representations of structured data. Based on this fundamental layer of the WebScout we have built three features: LinkInspector, SessionNavigator, and HistoryExplorer. The LinkInspector allows the user to pre-view the hyperlinked content within a zoomed out Browser placed next to the inspected link. The content of the pre-viewed page can be highlighted with respect to the recent search query or other active context. The SessionNavigator provides easy access to pages seen during a browsing session. It organizes the pages into WebTrails and provides a linear view of the navigation by transforming the navigation hierarchy into a sequence of ‘branches’. The HistoryExplorer provides a textual search over the contents and annotations of the pages and a color search over page thumbnails. It enables the user to browse the archive using graphical representations of past navigation patterns, e.g., WebTrails or visited Web sites.