Using page histories for improving browsing the web (original) (raw)

What can history tell us?: towards different models of interaction with document histories

2008

The current Web is a dynamic collection where little effort is made to version pages or to enable users to access historical data. As a consequence, they generally do not have sufficient temporal support when browsing the Web. However, we think that there are many benefits to be obtained from integrating documents with their histories. For example, a document's history can enable us to travel back through time to establish its trustworthiness. This paper discusses the possible types of interactions that users could have with document histories and it presents several examples of systems that we have implemented for utilizing this historical data. To support our view, we present the results of an online survey conducted with the objective of investigating user needs for temporal support on the Web. Although the results indicated quite low use of Web archives by users, they simultaneously emphasized their considerable interest in page histories.

Web History Tools and Revisitation Support: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Directions

Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction, 2007

Millions of web pages are visited, and revisited every day. On average, every second page loaded was already visited before by the same user-individual means for recurrence rates range between 20% and 72% (cf. p. 24). People revisit pages within a session or between parallel ones, they reuse web-based tools habitually, monitor specific content or resume interrupted sessions, and they want to re-find content after longer periods of time. Current history tools that support such revisits show unique and severe shortcomings. Often, revisits are cumbersome, more than necessary. This survey summarizes existing knowledge about revisitations on the web, and surveys the potential of graphic-based web history tools. A taxonomy of revisit-types distinguishes between short-, medium-, and long-term revisits, but also intra-and inter-session revisits. Assisted by a clear nomenclature this provides more clarity to the current discussion. The potential use of graphic-based tools is analyzed and discussed with respect to the found categories. The value of the current, mainly ix

Designing an integrated bookmark/history system for Web browsing

2000

ABSTRACT Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer attempt to make it easier for users to return to previously visited web pages. They offer three separate but important facilities: the back button, a bookmark system, and a history list. However, research indicates that users are not utilizing all of these systems effectively. In this paper, we present a single integrated history that unifies functionality similar to the back button, bookmarks and history lists.

Contextual web history: using visual and contextual cues to improve web browser history

2009

Abstract While most modern web browsers offer history functionality, few people use it to revisit previously viewed web pages. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Contextual Web History (CWH), a novel browser history implementation which improves the visibility of the history feature and helps people find previously visited web pages. We present the results of a formative user study to understand what factors helped people in finding past web pages.

Journey to the past: proposal of a framework for past web browser

2006

While the Internet community recognized early on the need to store and preserve past content of the Web for future use, the tools developed so far for retrieving information from Web archives are still difficult to use and far less efficient than those developed for the "live Web." We expect that future information retrieval systems will utilize both the "live" and "past Web" and have thus developed a general framework for a past Web browser. A browser built using this framework would be a client-side system that downloads, in real time, past page versions from Web archives for their customized presentation. It would use passive browsing, change detection and change animation to provide a smooth and satisfactory browsing experience. We propose a metaarchive approach for increasing the coverage of past Web pages and for providing a unified interface to the past Web. Finally, we introduce query-based and localized approaches for filtered browsing that enhance and speed up browsing and information retrieval from Web archives.

A Study of Three Browser History Mechanisms for Web Navigation

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Visualisation, 2001

Finding a previously visited page during web navigation is a very common and important process. Although most commercial browsers incorporate a history mechanism, when accessing pages that were recently visited users still rely mainly on the "Back" button. In this paper we studied the effectiveness of visually enhanced history browser mechanisms on web navigation. We used three different history mechanisms as the experiment treatments. Twenty-one college students were the subjects of the experimental trials. With a between subject design, three experimental groups were equally divided according to subject profiles. Users read and completed the given scenario. A quiz was given to measure user performance on the tested mechanism. At the end of the quiz, a subjective questionnaire was given to measure user satisfaction. The results showed that there is a significant statistical difference among the three mechanisms. The more visually enhanced history mechanism proved to be more effective in web browsing. 1.2. Overview of the history mechanisms studied Following are brief descriptions of the studied history mechanisms. Only three mechanisms were selected for use in this study. They were chosen based on availability.

How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems

1997

We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (web) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analysed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a wellknown web browser.

Memento: Time travel for the web

2009

The Web is ephemeral. Many resources have representations that change over time, and many of those representations are lost forever. A lucky few manage to reappear as archived resources that carry their own URIs. For example, some content management systems maintain version pages that reflect a frozen prior state of their changing resources. Archives recurrently crawl the web to obtain the actual representation of resources, and subsequently make those available via special-purpose archived resources. In both cases, the archival copies have URIs that are protocolwise disconnected from the URI of the resource of which they represent a prior state. Indeed, the lack of temporal capabilities in the most common Web protocol, HTTP, prevents getting to an archived resource on the basis of the URI of its original. This turns accessing archived resources into a significant discovery challenge for both human and software agents, which typically involves following a multitude of links from the original to the archival resource, or of searching archives for the original URI. This paper proposes the protocol-based Memento solution to address this problem, and describes a proof-of-concept experiment that includes major servers of archival content, including Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web.