WebFuret: An Intelligent Web Browser

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Introduction

WebFuret is an intelligent Web browser which watches your browsing, and just one click, it can retrieve more Web pages relevant to your search task. Please visit the official web site for more details.

Note: It is your own risk to use this software. No warranties!

An Effective Complete-Web Recommender System

WebFuret is an intelligent Web browser which can recommend pages relevant to the user's current search task without burdening the user with explicit input.

It's Passive.

The system will not require any explicit input from the user, instead it will gather the information it needs by watching the user's browsing.

It's Effective.

It will return pages that are relevant to the user's current information need and not just pages that others have found. For example, the page contains the article that the user wants to download, the page includes the product that the user wants to make a purchase of, etc.

It's Complete-Web

It will suggest pages from anywhere on the Web. N.b.: this is different from the host of standard recommender systems that are single site, which means the standard techniques are inapplicable.

What's a Web Furet?

From Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary:

fer·ret
Function: noun
Etymology: 
Middle English furet, ferret, from Middle French furet, ...
  1. ...
  2. an active and persistent searcher

Background

Imagine you are watching someone browse the web, and you see her examining the page of links, labeled "P₁" above. She clicks on a link whose anchor includes the word "Dolphins", which sends her to a page (P₂) about the Miami Dolphins, a football team in the NFL. She immediately clicks back to P₁, and on that page, then skips the second entry with the anchor "free dolphin", and clicks on the third link with anchor "Whale". She reads P₃, then follows a link with the anchor-words "whale" and "Shamu", until she reaches P₅, which involves "whales" and "seaworld".

At this point, you would probably assume the user is interested in "whale" and "dolphin", but not "football" or "NFL". This is because you saw the user follow links that include these first words, and back-out of a page that involves the second category. We can therefore characterize which words are "Information Content" (IC) words, in the context of the current session, based on its "browsing properties" -- e.g., how often the user followed an anchor that included a word, or backed out of a page whose title included a word, etc. We can then use these IC-words to identify which pages are likely to be useful --- "Information Content" (IC) pages --- as the pages that include many of these IC-words. And perhaps we could find the IC-pages by using the IC-words as the query terms in a search engine (like Google).

This recommender system is based on this idea. At run time, it collects the browsing properties of every word that appears in the user's current session, then uses a classifer to predict which of these words is likely to be an IC-word. It then has various ways of using the resulting set of IC-words to seek IC-pages.

For more details, please visit www.web-ic.com.

Using WebFuret

Install

After you download the compressed file, and unzip it into your local folder, double click "WebFuret.exe" to start!

Effective Complete-Web Recommendation

At anytime, no matter where you are on the Web and what you are working on, you can trigger WebFuret to generate a recommendation by pressing the "Suggest" button.

WebFuret does not require any explicit input from the user, instead it will gather the information it needs by watching the user's browsing. It uses trained user models to return a Web page that is expected to be relevant to the user's current search task. The page suggested comes from anywhere on the Web; n.b.: this is different from the host of standard recommender systems that are single site.

Extending your Web search

If you are eager to get more relevant pages each time you query a search engine, you will find this might be useful for you! Here, WebFuret tries to find more related topics for any of your search, and retrieve back the most promising result pages for you.

It is quite straightforward to operate as follows:

• Press "Extender" button on the tool bar.
• Type your search keyword(s) in the edit box, then click "Search" button.
• Select one of these extended categories to explore.
• Double click one of these search results to open it on your default browser.

Multi-Tab Browsing Interface

WebFuret's most advanced tabbed interface will give you the most exciting browsing experience!

All the web pages are arranged within the main window. As you can see, multiple web pages are indicated by tabs for easy navigation, and it is now easy for you to close any page that you do not want to stay.

History

• WebFuret 0.0.01, June 2005