Locating software items is difficult, even for knowledgeable software designers, when searching in large, complex and continuously growing libraries. This paper describes a technique, we term active browsing. An active browser suggests to the designer items it estimates to be close to the target of the search. The novel aspect of active browsing is that it is entirely unobtrusive: it infers its similarity measure from the designer's normal browsing actions, without any special input. Experiments are presented in which the active browsing system succeeds 40% of the time in identifying the target before the designer has found it. An additional experiment indicates that this approach does, indeed, speed-up search.

This research addresses the problem of locating software items in extensive libraries. It aims to increase the speed and accuracy with which a user may browse software libraries for reusable code. The method proposed for this is called active browsing. The system monitors user actions, made within a normal browser, to infer an analogue representing the user's search goal. A relevancy measure is constructed from this analogue and used by the system to scan the library independently of the user and to evaluate potentially interesting components. The results affect the browser display to emphasize relevant components and thus aid search.

This paper discusses a novel method called active browsing which increases the speed and accuracy with which a user may browse libraries for reusable software. Information inferred solely from the user’s normal actions is employed by the system to locate software items relevant to the user’s search goal. This paper describes our active browsing system and illustrates its operation with an example using typical browsing steps. An experiment, using an automated browsing agent, is described demonstrating that active browsing accelerates search. 1