InfoLead - a new concept for cruising navigation technology

A new concept is described for navigating the World Wide Web effectively. Called InfoLead, it assists users in finding their way to target information by helping them to visualize a Web document space (WDS). Each document identified by the search engine as possibly having the target information is rendered into a bitmap image and placed in a WDS, which is three-dimensional. A document is positioned in the space based on its relationships to the other identified documents. A user can easily get an overview of the entire WDS by "cruising", in which the user freely explores a wide area along a path in the WDS, and can view the contents of a particular Web document by zooming. In addition, InfoLead displays other information related to the documents, for instance, user traffic volumes, thereby improving the efficiency of navigation. The performance of InfoLead was evaluated in terms of the navigable speed factor (NSF), which is determined by the image-rendering speed and the frame-display rate. Evaluation of an experimental implementation showed that it had at least twice the NSF of a typical PC-based browsing system.