Title:Followmylink: User Directed Browsing on the Web
CSAI
APT Proposal 2005/6
Title:FollowMyLink: User Directed Browsing on the Web
Supervisor:Dr. Chris Staff
KEYWORDS: Information indexing and retrieval, user modelling, adaptive systems, hypertext, WWW.
Description:In the past, users browsing the Web would have to visit a search engine’s search page to use it. This need to ‘jump’ to a search page is becoming less of a requirement as Web Browser designers more closely integrate web search functionality into their browsers. For example, virtually all Web Browsers have a search bar in the user interface itself through which users can submit terms to their favourite search engine. Some browsers, such as Safari, FireFox and Mozilla, go one step further. Highlight a term or phrase in the current Web page, bring up the contextual menu, select “Search”, and those terms will be submitted to a search engine.
FollowMyLink will extend this integrated approach to search. Safari, Mozilla, and FireFox do not take the context of the search into account. For instance, a user visiting a Web page dedicated to squash may highlight and search on the term “rules”. However, when the term is submitted to the search engine important additional information, which could have disambiguated the term or provided a context for the search, is not provided to the search engine. FollowMyLink will analyse the current Web page, and possibly other pages that the user has visited in the current browsing session, to discover additional search terms to submit to the search engine along with the term or phrase that the user has selected.
Rather than only displaying the results of the search in the search engine’s results page, the top ranking destinations will be offered to the user through, for example, a popup with the synopsis (the description snippet given by the search engine) available to the user as a tool tip. The user can select his or her destination from this list. This functionality will enable a user to browse through the Web using dynamic links that are relevant to the user’s recent browsing history, rather than being chained to paths provided by the author of the Web page.
Although students are free to use any programming environment, search engine, and Web browser, they are encouraged to use open source technologies, the Google API, and Mozilla FireFox.
Tasks:
Reading and general research: 4 days
Designing FollowMyLink: 1 day
Implementation:
User model builder:5 days
Query generator: 1 day
Query results processor: 1 day
Browser integration: 5 days
Testing OR user evaluation: 2 days
Writing up: 5 days
Max 1 Page