Cyberbrowsing: Information Customization on the Web

The ability to discriminate and distinguish among individual documents in the ever-increasing volume of information available through digital networks is becoming more and more difficult. With websites being added to the 100 million installed base by tens of thousands per month, information overload is inevitable (H. Berghel, 1997). There are two basic paradigms for dealing with this information overload: filtering (Information filtering, 1992) information before it reaches the end-user, and customizing the information after it arrives (Berleant & Berghel, 1994a, 1994b). Filtering remains primarily a server side activity since filtering at the client-side would necessitate unnecessary downloads. Information customization is a client-side activity designed to pick up where information filtering leaves off. In this article, we describe our vision of information customization and, along the way, chronicle the development of our proofof-concept prototype, Cyberbrowser, for customizing information on the Web.