Browse

Of course, what we usually mean by browse is to traverse a directory. Yahoo is sitting on a unique and nearly priceless resource -- their famed directory -- yet despite being a category leader they treat the directory like a poor relation of search.

I believe browse has a bright future. For one thing, most of the popular social applications emphasize browse navigation of one sort or another - and social media is a fast-rising source for content discovery: http://searchblog.tamar.com/2008/06/social-networks.html

Aside from this site, I maintain a niche web forum. Not long after I developed the forum software, I added a topical refinement mechanism for the master thread index, calling it "browse" because that is a term people recognize for exploring links by topic. I was surprised by the immediate popularity of that interface, which has always remained strong. I also have a search mechanism available, but the browse vastly outpulls search.

So browse remains useful, and used, but where does it go from here? I believe the user needs to have more of a sense of place within the directory. The top page is probably not the optimum starting point for most users. A personalized directory home page that has integration with social media is probably the way to go.

The greatest improvements yet to make in web browse may be improvements to the directory hierarchy -- also known as the ontology. Perhaps the killer app of tomorrow is a directory ontology which has been refined by user data (both user-supplied and drawn from click path analysis). But instead of hosting all the link data (the traditional Yahoo directory model), links and content are drawn from myriad sources (Google API, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, RSS feeds). Or maybe the ontology is simply made available for mashups.