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ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
INTRODUCTION
This paper proposes a system that extends the traditional history tool from one which simply lists a user's surf history to one which also handles contextual information regarding the pages visited and the paths that link the various pages. Since information generated during a surf session is of a streaming (data is available sequentially over time) rather than random access (all data is immediately available) form, an overview and understanding of the surf environment is accumulated by the user in piecewise fashion. If the opportunity that exists for the user to enrich and annotate the surf world as it evolves is exploited, it can greatly contribute to the user's orientation while surfing the web. THE SYSTEM
Basic Description
 The display is in tree fashion and allows interactive zooming and scrolling. The nodes, shown as boxes around text names, represent the pages visited. A node can be in one of three states: normal, selected (highlighted box) or current URL (inverse text). At any given instance, only one node can be selected and only one node can be the current URL, although a node can be in both states simultaneously. When the user selects a node by clicking on it, the node's title, name, URL and comments are displayed. The title and URL are taken from the browser and cannot be modified. The user is free, however, to modify the name and the comments for additional annotation. By default, the system creates a name, as best it can, from the given URL. Since the web is a fully directed, cyclic graph rather than a well behaved tree, displaying all the links can result in a cluttered and unreadable screen [5]. The solution is to show the primary surf path - i.e. of all the links followed to reach some node A, only the first link taken to A is shown by default. However, the user has the option to see all the links taken from the selected node or all the links taken to reach the selected node, as well as simply all the links in existence. Nodes can be searched by URL, title, name, or phrases found in the comments. Unwanted nodes that clutter up the graph can be pruned from the graph through deletion. Finally, surf sessions can be saved, retrieved and merged with other surf sessions. Surf Visualization
A locality is defined as a collection of pages that a user surfed within to a higher degree than elsewhere. While some empirical data based on user logs found little to substantiate the conjectured significance of the notion of localities [6][7], the idea seems so important that users are willing to manually establish them via bookmarks [1]. This discrepancy between studies may be due to the fact that existing systems do not have the sufficient facilities for tracking localities. With so much to explore on the web, users may find themselves losing track of pages they would otherwise like to revisit. Using bookmarks to save page references often results in a bookmarking system that is ineffective both because it is overwhelmed and because it mixes noteworthy pages with ones of passing interest. If, however, pages could easily be marked without requiring the commitment of bookmarks, users might be encouraged to track and return to pages of interest.Groups of pages so marked can thus mature into localities. To facilitate this, SurfSerf allows the user to color nodes and to annotate the colors in order to create a contextually rich graph that makes the user's meaningful groupings of related nodes apparent to the user. A path between page A and page B is defined as the links taken to reach B from A. SurfSerf is able to detect and highlight all the paths that brought the surf session from A to B and the user is allowed to scroll through and see all the paths found. SurfSerf additionally introduces the notion of a neighborhood in web browsing. Whereas a path is a series of links taken to get from A to B, the neighborhood of A are all the pages that could be reached from A after traversing n links. Neighbors of A can be highlighted with each successive generation growing dimmer in intensity. The notion of a neighborhood allows a user to see all the pages a particular page has taken the session to in the past. Finally, SurfSerf subsumes the notion of a history list and combines the lists of different windows into an overall history log. While some studies have dismissed the importance of the use of multiple windows in a browsing session [6][7], others have embraced its use as fundamental to effective surfing [3]. Either way, the possibility that a surf session may extend over multiple windows should be accounted for by a surf visualizer - the user may, for instance, want to scan the results of a search in new windows so as not to have to backtrack to the original search results. SurfSerf includes all the windows associated with a browsing session in the same graph, visually tagging pages opened in new windows. Applications and Implications
While SurfSerf can easily find many applications areas, a most interesting implication is one that does not use it as a surf visualizer or history mechanism at all: users have remarked that SurfSerf gives them a "sense of place". Even when not used for recalling previously visited pages, simply having such a tool around gives the users with a sense of security. In this way, SurfSerf is very much like a common street map: one can use it to return to a given place but one can also simply carry it around to feel freer when exploring a new place since there is the feeling that getting lost will not be such a great problem with a map in hand. This result suggests that current users may not be as exploratory when surfing the net for fear of getting lost. It may very well be the case that the observation that users venture "rarely more than two links away before returning" [4] can be traced to a fear of getting lost rather than finding that there is nothing worthwhile to explore beyond two links. SurfSerf's greatest contribution may, in fact, be as a means to encourage greater exploratory surfing on the web. CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
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