Focused browsing: Providing topical feedback for link
selection in hypertext browsing
Jones, Gareth J.F.ORCID: 0000-0003-2923-8365 and Li, Quixiang
(2008)
Focused browsing: Providing topical feedback for link
selection in hypertext browsing.
In: 30th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research (ECIR 2008), 30 Mar - 3 Apr 2008, Glasgow, Scotland.
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.