Your browser's built-in search function is a good example of a page search engine. And it's also probably the only example, at least until browseye came into the picture.
Browseye is a browser
toolbar that lets you search for specific information inside a web page. You
simply type in the toolbar what you are looking for and then you see how some parts of the web page fade out.
Those are the parts that do not contain what you are looking for. The parts of
the page that are left untouched are those which may contain information
relevant to your query.
Thus, with browseye you don’t need to process so much textual
information and you can find faster, with less effort and more reliably
what you are looking for. Browseye also tells you whether the links in the web page are relevant. That is, if they will take you to pages with relevant
information. This way you don’t have to bother and visit those links which
are not marked as relevant.
Let’s see all this with
an example. Assume that you are on Nasa's website looking for information about the planet Mars.
Well, you’ve certainly landed on the right page, it sure contains a lot of
information on Mars. But where is it?
To answer this
question you’ll typically have to read a little bit here and there, make a few
clicks and you’ll eventually find something about Mars. This will cost you
time, effort, and you’ll never know if somewhere behind an unclicked link there
was a valuable article on Mars. That is, of course, unless you click on all of
the links you see on the page, which doesn’t seem to be an intelligent strategy.
Wouldn’t it be nice to
have a tool that tells you which text paragraphs speak about Marks and which
links hide information about this planet?
That’s precisely what browseye does. After introducing the term “mars” in the
toolbar:
- Text paragraphs that do not contain the word “mars” are faded out.
- Links with a yellow background point to pages that contain the word “mars”. You can explore the menus and just focus on the links that are relevant to your search.
One of the design
principles of browseye is to make it nonintrusive. To return to the original
page view you just have to press ESC; and if you don’t need browseye for now, just
close it.
So, if you do use the
search function from your browser, you’ll find in browseye a very powerful tool
to save your time. And if you don’t use it, press CTRL-f in your browser or
install browseye and welcome to the world of page search engines!
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