Rummaging through the internet: Economist

Jun 5th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing

THE web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another.

But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink—not just those chosen by a website’s authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things.

All that information, of course, can already be accessed by web users willing to root around, opening a series of new browser windows or tabs. The goal of Hyperwords, Mr Hegland says, is “reducing the threshold” of satisfying curiosity, by making the quest faster and easier. Later this year he will release a new version that extends this trick beyond the web browser, turning any word in any window into a clickable “hyperword”.

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