Wish I hadn't clicked that: context based icons for mobile web navigation and directed search tasks

Typical web navigation techniques tend to support undirected web browsing, a depth-first search of information pages. This search strategy often results in the unintentional behavior of 'web surfing', where a user starts in search of information, but is sidetracked by tangential links. A mobile user in particular, would prefer to extract the desired information quickly and with minimal mental effort. In this paper, we introduce 'SemantiLynx' to visually augment hyperlinks on web pages for better supporting the task of directed searches on small-screen ubiquitous platforms. Our algorithm comprises four parts: establishing the context of information related to a hyperlink, retrieving relevant imagery based on this context, applying image simplification, and finally compositing a visual icon for the given hyperlink. We evaluated our system by conducting user studies for directed web search tasks and comparing the results to using textual snippets and webpage thumbnails.

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