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Related Links and other such fun stuff

What is it?

The Mozilla browser has a feature called "Related Links" which is part of a set of features called "Smart Browsing".

Imagine a "helper" who looked over your shoulder at what you were browsing and suggested other things you might want to look at. Some examples,

  1. Related Items ala Alexa : If you are looking www.whitehouse.gov, you might want the urls for the Senate, Edgar, Library of Congress, etc. handy...
  2. If you are about to give your credit card number to someone, maybe you want the Dun and Bradstreet rating on that company...
  3. A service that pointed you to spoofs of the site you were currently looking at.

This is a fundamental tweak to the way the web works. Currently, when a user is looking at a web page, there is a simple bilateral relation between the user and that web site.

With SmartBrowsing, we can now have trilateral relations with the opportunity for a set of third parties to contribute.

Where to see it

The UI for this feature has been implemented on mac and windows and is being implemented on unix.

Go to the View menu and select "Show Navigation Center". Go to some page like www.whitehouse.gov. Select the 4th button on the Aurora selector (SiteTools). You will see a folder called "Related Links". Open it to get a list of recommendations of what to look at in the context of www.whitehouse.gov. If you leave the folder open, it will keep getting refreshed as you surf around.

How it works

You can have any number of "Smart Browsing Providers". Look under the "Navigator Internals" section of Aurora (6th button on the selector) and you will see a folder called "Smart Browsing Providers" (SBP). Each SBP is really just a url. For example, the Related Items SBP is http://www-rl1.netscape.com/wtgn? When you go to http://www.baz.com/foo, the contents --- in RDF --- of http://www-rl1.netscape.com/wtgn?www.baz.com/foo are fetched and displayed.

More details on request ...



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