Managing WWW browser's bookmarks and history : (a Mozilla Firefox extension)

Abstract

All WWW Browsers offer bookmarks and history management features. The problem with these features is the low level of functionality that is offered. Many third party programs exist to offer the extra functionality, but these are not integrated with the browser and run as separate tools. The main problem with bookmark files is that they may become unorganized and grow linearly with time, possibly having duplicate bookmarks and dead bookmarks. The history is not so much used as it is too vast and complex to find a node from within it. For these reasons this thesis will present HyperBK an extension for Mozilla Firefox which will offer additional functionality to the browser's bookmarks and history utilities. Such features include automatic classification of bookmarks to their appropriate category, a thumbnail for each bookmark, verification of bookmarks and even keeping a local copy on disk in case the page is offline. On the other hand the history will be given a view where visited pages are grouped into a structure similar to the bookmark categories, where the user can apply some filters to ease his search even more. The last aspect of HyperBK will be that of integrating with search engines using them to locate a bookmarked page in case it has moved server or to provide 'See Also' recommendations for a particular bookmark category. An evaluation was carried out to test the classification algorithm and the 'See Also' recommendations. The results obtained were quite promising as in fact 67% of bookmarks used from real users were classified into the correct category. Regarding the 'See Also' recommendations users rated them: 41% as 'Good', and another 41% as 'Really Good'.