Memex: a browsing assistant for collaborative archiving and mining of surf trails

Abstract

Keyword indices, topic directories and link-based rankings are used to search and structure the rapidly growing Web today. Surprisingly little use is made of years of browsing experience of millions of people. Indeed, this information is routinely discarded by browsers. Even deliberate bookmarks are stored in a passive and isolated manner. All this goes against Vannevar Bush’s dream of the Memex: An enhanced supplement to personal and community memory. We propose to demonstrate the beginnings of a ‘Memex’ for the Web: A browsing assistant for individuals and groups with focused interests. Memex blurs the artificial distinction between browsing history and deliberate bookmarks. The resulting glut of data is analyzed in a number of ways at the individual and community levels. Memex constructs a topic directory customized to the community, mapping their interests naturally to nodes in this directory. This lets the user recall topic-based browsing contexts by asking questions like “What trails was I following when I was last surfing about classical music?” and “What are some popular pages in or near my community’s recent trail graph related to music?”