The Site Browser: Catalyzing improvements in hypertext organization

Abstract

The Site Browser endeavors to build an overview browsing system for the entire Web. Overview browsing represents an alternative to the search-based view of information work, and does so by providing a consistent set of summary views which can be browsed interactively. The views partition and linearize the corpus for ready understanding and exploration. They show a web site's relation to other sites, the broad nature of the information it contains and how it is structured, and how it has changed over time. The design challenge is to generate useful summary information in a process which is fast enough to be updated daily. Our current system maintains a continuously updated archive of 46 million sites representing 2.3 billion web pages.