Web page caricatures: multimedia summaries for WWW documents

This paper addresses the problem of rapid browsing of a large set of World Wide Web documents, such as the results of a search engine query or a bookmark list. Traditional presentations of such lists are in the form of text, and require careful attention and often laborious efforts in order to discover relevant documents. We propose a visual representation of documents, called a caricature, which emphasizes the key points of a document in a way which quickly conveys these points to the user, and thus facilitates document selection. We describe a representation-independent WWW document summary, called a feature vector, which includes novel techniques for determining link density and a representative image among other features. An example caricature template for this feature vector is given, along with several examples of caricatures.