NetBrilliant - Searching the Web

The above window, entitled "Web search," will appear with your web search results. It contains a number of tools to direct you in your searching.

	Viewing the results
	Your results appear in the list as shown. By default, all the results are validated; NetBrilliant checks each link to make sure it's really there. Dead links are marked with red dots; live links with green dots. Some search engines also save backup copies of pages; when NetBrilliant can't find a page but an engine has a copy somewhere else, it puts a blue dot next to the link, and when you double-click the link you're automatically taken to the cached copy (not shown). You can also see the access times for pages reported. In traditional search engines, you might click a link and wait a very long time to get to the site; with the access times, you know to avoid very slow sites. Sites are sorted by rank. You cannot resort them on other columns. To visit a web page, just double-click it. You can also right-click each link to show its menu; each page can be added to your Page Pad this way. Links you've already visited turn grey to help you see which you've visited already (not shown).
	Zeroing-in
	A big part, if not the biggest part, of searching the web is zeroing-in on what you want. Many people spend a lot of time just reading through the thousands of results that come from their queries. It's not that search engines aren't smart enough; it's impossible, even if a human were answering the query, to find the specific piece of information you're interested in when all you get to enter is a little text in a box. Sometimes, you'll even learn new things while you're searching and your goals will shift slightly. For all these reasons, zeroing-in is a very important part of NetBrilliant; we try to provide tools to really help you with this. The one pictured is the automatic category system. When your page results have come in, NetBrilliant creates a category hierarchy for you based on the implicit topics of the pages returned. This allows you to quickly narrow your search; you can delete categories that are obviously not what you want (right-click them, choose "Delete"); you can click categories to view only the pages therein; and you can expand categories to create smaller, more specific sub-categories. Not only that, but you can also filter your results based on the domains they come from, as pictured above. Strike-out domains you don't want to concentrate on the ones you do want. Or, if you're just looking for a web service or site, just go right to the domain list and double-click an item to go right to the site. You can also filter your results based solely on text. That's what the Filter box is for; type in the text you want to require, and hit Enter; all pages which do not contain that text will be temporarily removed. There are many tools in NetBrilliant; don't worry if you don't know how to use all of them straight off the bat. Just play with them, explore. As you get more used to the NetBrilliant environment, you'll become faster and faster in your searches. Before too long, you'll be amazed at how fast and efficient you are, and you'll never want to go back.

The above window, entitled "Web search," will appear with your web search results. It contains a number of tools to direct you in your searching.

	Viewing the results
	Your results appear in the list as shown. The results are not validated, because they may be shuffled around so much when you zero-in. To validate the links, click the validate button. All the features you have in the Advanced interface (above) are also present in the Yes No Maybe interface; links are validated, access times reported, and cached copies found.
	Zeroing-in
	The Yes No Maybe interface is a totally new way of finding what you want. After your results are gathered, NetBrilliant creates different concepts, ideas, terms and even web addresses relating to the results, and places them all in the Maybe box (near the "2"). From there, you move the concepts you like to the Yes box, and the ones you don't to the No box; you can leave any of them in the Maybe box too. As you review the concepts, the results begin to sort themselves out based on what you like; you can see your progress in the blue "skyscraper" view to the right. When the skyscrapers are really tall at the top and small at the bottom, you've really pulled out what you want; you can then read through your results. There is more information available to you as well. You can select skyscrapers (in yellow) to select the associated documents in the results view. When you click on an item in the results view, it selects it in the skyscrapers view (in purple) and all the terms related to it in the Yes, No and Maybe boxes, so you can see what each page relates to, and find similar pages.

Each time you perform a search, your goal may be very different from other times. Your goals and interests may be much different from your friends and co-workers. Many people converge on the same technology, and each expects to find his answers quickly and efficiently. With conventional search engines, which provide just a text box, it's hard to differentiate your interests from those of others. That's why NetBrilliant provides a suite of tools for searching. In NetBrilliant, searching is a journey. This section describes how you might use these tools for different types of searches. Of course, your real interests are probably different; you'll eventually learn how to use them efficiently for your own tasks. Before long, you'll wonder how you got along without them.

Finding specific information - Sometimes you may have a very specific information need. For example, you might want to know how the Harvard men's squash team did last year, what their lineup was. This kind of specific information can be answered by a single web page, and if you type in a reasonable query (like "harvard men's squash") the answer will probably be somewhere in the many results returned. The goal, then, is to find what you want quickly. For this, the category system is very useful. You can use the category system to throw out pages pertaining to other squash teams, the game of squash, and other unrelated pages, for example. Just right-click a bad category and choose "Delete". The number of pages you actually have to look at will decrease dramatically. Or, you might go to the domain list, and show only the pages from the domain www.harvard.edu. Using these two tools together, the domain and the category systems, you can really narrow in to what you want.

General subject overviews - You just read an interesting paper, and you want to know more about its field. So you just type in the paper name to NetBrilliant, or maybe the author's name. The category system will create categories of all the pages that return in just a few seconds; from this you can easily see the different groupings of subjects around what you typed. Explore each category to get a sense of what it represents. Some categories may surprise you. For example, try the query term "jaguar." You'll see categories on the animal, categories on the car; but you'll also see a category for Atari, or video games (there's an Atari video game system called Jaguar). The category system is very powerful in helping you get an overview of a subject, something totally new to web search.

Finding a service - Let's say you want to send flowers to your special someone. You don't really care where from (they're all basically the same anyway); you just want to find a site, order your flowers, and be done with it. Here, the domain system comes in handy. Type in a query like "flowers" or "buy flowers"; and go straight to the domain list. You'll see a lot of uninteresting domains (people's home pages on www.geocities.com, pages on flowers, flower care, and so on). But you'll also see domains that are promising (e.g. "buyflowers.com", "cheapflowers.com"). Click the domain to go straight there. No hassles, no wading through extraneous pages.

Exploring - You don't really know what you want. You have an idea, but you're not sure exactly. Here's where all the NetBrilliant hardware comes into play. You can let the category system show you where your current search is headed; the domains list may help you too, although probably not very much. Three other tools, heretofore undiscussed, will come in very handy. The first is on the screen: the Filter box. As you're reading through the result pages, you realize you're always looking for the same words. So you type them into the Filter box, and immediately the pages are automatically filtered for those words. Much easier than reading through yourself. But often your search is more complicated than this; you may formulate multiple queries, search for different things, and later want to come back to early searches. For this, the Search History makes it as easy as a single click. Or you might find a page that's pretty good, you think, but you're not sure. At any rate you want to keep it around, maybe you'll come back to it. For this, the Page Pad is perfect; just right-click the page, and add it to the Page Pad. Then it'll be there for you to pick up later if you want.