Alex Iskold
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

More than a year ago I wrote an article in the Web 2.0 magazine entitled Smart Browser, Where Art Thou? Here is what I said back then:

It is obvious that memory plays a critical role in human intellect and human interactions. Yet today our interactions with computers, and the web in particular, are disappointingly stateless. We keep going back to the Google search box and re-entering the same stuff over and over again. The computer simply has no idea what we are looking for and how to help us find it. Ah, you’d say, but how can it? Don’t we need artificial intelligence for that? My claim in this article is that no, we do not. Instead, we need to get inspiration from complexity science and focus on usability and productivity.

I went on to describe the first problem with today’s browser — the lack of understanding of everyday objects. As soon as we bookmark something the semantics is lost. The computer does not really know that the link represents a movie we liked, a book we just finished or a glass of wine we enjoyed. Because the computer does not know, it can not be helpful. The whole reason why people are helpful to each other is because we have common basic understanding of what things are.

I argued, though, that for the browser to be helpful, it does not need to have the same kind of understanding that we have. It all depends what problem are you trying to solve. Here at AdaptiveBlue, we are trying to solve the following problem (at least for now):

How can the browser and the user get to the relevant information faster?

This is seemingly a simple thing, but it really isn’t. The relevancy implies specificity to a person and the context. Faster means with less search and less copy/paste and less clicking. How can the browser help us do this?

Over the past year we made the first step towards solving this problem — it is called the SmartMenu.

The SmartMenu is a set of context-sensitive shortcuts personalized based on the user’s browsing history. Context-sensitive means that entries change depending on what the user is looking at. The personalization means that the sites in the shortcuts are specific to this user. And yes, shortcuts are just that — shortcuts.

Lets see why this makes sense. Say there are 30 really popular sites for shopping reviews and social networking around books. Most of us would only use a couple of these sites regularly. When we search around for books we either use a search engine like Google or go to the sites directly and search within the site.

When we search Google we get a lot of results back and these results are not personalized (well, not really). So often we end up sifting through the results manually to find the right link. On the other hand whenever we search within each individual site we typically go to one site, find something, then copy it, then open another tab, then go to another site and paste and only then search.

The point is that both of these problems – sifting and copying and pasting can be solved with SmartMenu.

Because SmartMenu recognizes books, music, movies, wine, travel destinations, stock, people and many other things on hundreds of popular sites it knows what you are looking at. Depending on what you are looking it, for each attribute of an object, such as author or a director or a winery or even a tag, there is a set of many shortcuts based to each of the popular site. But only a few of them apply to you, because, based on your browsing history, you only visited these, and not other, sites.

When you select a shortcut on the SmartMenu you are performing targeted vertical search or even vertical navigation if the page is direct hit. You are bypassing copy/paste, the opening of the tab and sifting through Google results. What happens is that you get to relevant information faster.

Obviously we did not create an artificial intelligence. Our agent, the SmartMenu, is hardwired rather than intelligent. It has meta data for each type of object, it has a set of actions to apply to each type of object and it has heuristics to recognize objects of each type on the web.

But really, do we need to build artificial intelligence or are we looking to make our life easier?

We believe that what SmartMenu is doing today is pretty exciting, but we are actively working to make it better and more useful. The SmartMenu 2.0 will get you to the information even faster and will be even more relevant. It will leverage the combination of web services, our knowledge and user feedback to make your browsing experience better.

In the second installment on this topic, we will talk about different contexts — a page, a link and the text. Please come back to check it out and let us know what you think about SmartMenu in the BlueOrganizer Denim. Do you think that your browser got smarter?

This article first appeared on BlueBlog (AdaptiveBlue’s blog).

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