Overview of Visualization Tools for Web Browser History Data
This is an incremental review for web users and developers facing navigation difficulties due to the web's growth and loose document interconnections.
The paper addresses the challenge of navigating the web by providing an overview of graphical tools and techniques to help users track and return to previously visited pages, concluding with a comparative analysis of these tools.
Nowadays, the Web has become one of the most widespread platforms for information change and retrieval. As it becomes easier to publish documents, as the number of users, and thus publishers, increases and as the number of documents grows, searching for information is turning into a cumbersome and time-consuming operation. Because of the loose interconnection between documents, people have difficulty remembering where they have been and returning to previously visited pages. Navigation through the web faces problems of locating oneself with respect to space and time. The idea of graphical assistance navigation is to help users to find their paths in hyperspace by adapting the style of link presentation to the goals, knowledge and other characteristics of an individual user. We first introduce the concepts related to web navigation; we then present an overview of different graphical navigation tools and techniques. We conclude by presenting a comparative table of these tools based on some pertinent criteria.