Using Memex to archive and mine community Web browsing experience

Keyword indices, topic directories, and link-based rankings are used to sea rch and structure the rapidly growing Web today. Surprisingly little use is made of years of browsing experience of millions of people. Indeed, this i nformation is routinely discarded by browsers. Even deliberate bookmarks ar e stored passively, in browser-dependent formats; this separates them from the dominant world of HTML hypermedia, even if their owners were willing to share them. All this goes against Vannevar Bush's dream of the Memex: an e nhanced supplement to personal and community memory. We present the beginni ngs of a Memex for the Web. Memex blurs the artificial distinction between browsing history and deliberate bookmarks. The resulting glut of data is an alyzed in a number of ways. It is indexed not only by keywords but also acc ording to the user's view of topics; this lets the user recall topic-based browsing contexts by asking questions like 'What trails was I following whe n I was last surfing about classical music?' and 'What are some popular pag es related to my recent trail regarding cycling?' Memex is a browser assist ant that performs these functions. We envisage that Memex will be shared by a community of surfers with overlapping interests; in that context, the me aning and ramifications of topical trails may be decided by not one but man y surfers. We present a novel formulation of the community taxonomy synthes is problem, algorithms, and experimental results. We also recommend uniform APIs which will help managing advanced interactions with the browser. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.