A Mechanism of Trailing the Footprint for the Previously Visited Web Pages to Ease a Meta-Knowledge-Based Search

It is very common for users to re-visit web pages, and in fact this can be said to be common practice. This re-visiting can in many cases be based on their own or another person´s recorded history, e.g., a search history or bookmarks. However they someday come to the point where the history becomes useless and they have to click through several web pages again by utilizing their know-how to find intended web pages because the web is continuously changing. We here propose a mechanism (called the Foot print Trailer) of assisting a user to ease a metaknowledge-based search in re-visiting by dividing the web search into a knowledge-based search and a meta-knowledge-based search, each of which, respectively, employs the search history (called the Footprint) or the know-how regarding the search. Though the latter search should be done by a user, the former search is designed to work with the latter one for reducing the number of link anchors clicked and that of the web pages revisited manually. The effect of the Foot print Trailer was experimentally clarified by two types of case studies, where a user revisited the web pages that had been visited by the user and that had been visited by others.