Re: Navigating Vs Searching (keywords and metainformation)

At 09:18 1998/11/11 -0600, Jon Gunderson wrote:
>I think the type of searching Al is talking about is very useful in the
>case you know what you are looking for.  But, we also want to help user who
>are just trying to explore new pages, so searching just headers by creating
>a list of just the headers is very useful.  The user can then sequentially
>move though just the headers.  
>
>The question I have is can this be considered a search or should we have a
>different label like direct navigation?

That is a distinct subset of direct navigation, useful by itself. So is
stepping
by links (to external URLs as one class, and to internal URLs as another).
For electronic books, even print page numbers have value (table of
contents, index
of original print versions have print page number references) when jointly
using
materials with some the printed book and others eyes-free.
> 
We have discussed stepping through links, headers (H1...H6), and searching
for 
a string (possibly with wildcards). 

Some authors supply keywords. These may well have been the reason for the
page 
to have been found for the user by some search engine. When the author adds a 
reasonable number of pertinent keywords, they would be a useful fourth aid to 
search, and to characterize remote pages at more detail than the title of
the page.

Would the list of keywords on a document be useful, once the document is open?
As it is part of the head metainformation, it is not normally exposed to
the user.
We allude to the usefulness of stepping by links, referring to the anchors
in the
body, not the links to external URLs in the head. There may be other
metainformation
now hidden to the user in the head. Should any of that be exposable? 
>Jon

Regards/Harvey

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 1998 15:58:53 UTC