Interaction techniques for automating collecting and organizing personal web content

The growth of the World Wide Web has led to a dramatic increase in accessible information. Today, people use the Web for a large variety of activities including travel planning, comparison shopping, entertainment, and research. However, the tools available for collecting, organizing, and sharing Web content have not kept pace with the rapid growth in information. Today people continue to use bookmarks, email, and printers for managing Web content. In this thesis, I present a set of semi-automatic interaction techniques for retrieving content from the Web using the structure of webpages, presentation principles based on layout templates for user-guided organization of content from any number of Web sources, and a new template-based search paradigm for the Web that transforms keyword search into a goal-oriented rich visual experience. To demonstrate the efficacy of these ideas I combined them into a working system and evaluated them through a three-month longitudinal user study. Finally, the ideas that I present in this thesis when popularized by an online Web community would allow average Web users to build a kind of machine-readable "Semantic Web" piece by piece as they go about accomplishing their personal tasks.

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