Enabling Social Navigation on the Web

For a place that gathers millions of people the Web seems pretty lonely at times. This is mainly due to the current predominant browsing scenario; that of an individual participating in an autonomous surfing session. We believe that people should be seen as an integral part of the browsing and searching activity towards a concept known as social navigation. In this work, we extend the typical Web browserpsilas functionality so as to raise awareness of other people having similar Web surfing goals at the current moment. We further present features and algorithms that facilitate online communication and collaboration towards common searching targets. The utility of our system is established by experimental studies. The extentions we present can be easily adopted in a typical Web browser.