Abstract

The two paradigms of searching and browsing are currently almost always used separately. One can either look at the library card catalog, or browse the shelves; one can either search large WWW sites (or the whole web), or browse page by page. In this paper we describe a software tool we developed, called WebGlimpse, that combines the two paradigms. It allows the search to be limited to a neighborhood of the current document. WebGlimpse automatically analyzes collections of web pages and computes those neighborhoods (at indexing time). With WebGlimpse users can browse at will, using the same pages; they can also jump from each page, through a search, to "close-by" pages related to their needs. In a sense, our combined paradigm allows users to browse using hypertext links that are constructed on the fly through a neighborhood search. The design of WebGlimpse concentrated on four goals: fast search, efficient indexing (both in terms of time and space), flexible facilities for d...

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