Roundup of Graphical Navigation Helpers on the Web

Abstract

Despite the recent research, the Web remains mainly constituted of an ever-growing network of documents. 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 introduced the concepts related to web navigation; then present an overview of different graphical navigation tools and techniques. We concluded by presenting a comparative table of these tools based on some pertinent criteria.