REAPING INFORMATION: DYNAMIC NAVIGATION HELPS USERS SEPARATE THE DIGITAL WHEAT

摘要

Remember Pong, the black-and-white video game where players attempted to score points by hitting a pixel ball with a vertical straight line? The game caused quite a sensation when a home video version was released in the U.S. in the early 70s. But gaming technology rapidly evolved, and the quirky game soon was relegated to bargain bins and basements as gamers demanded more sophisticated forms of entertainment. A similar transformation has taken place in the search technology market. Remember AltaVista? It transformed search by letting people use "natural language" to find information, as well as by providing a full-text database of a large part of the web (as opposed to directory-only search tools).