> ps. the "What's Related" feature is the Alexa surf-engine that I was
> talking about a few days ago.
Not necessarily (at least in Mozilla/Nav.5; perhaps v4.5 is hardcoded).
Mozilla seems to have a notion of one or more 'SmartBrowsingProviders'
identified by URI and specified as RDF statements in the browser's
configuration file. When the browser feels a need to find related links
w.r.t. the current URI, a very simple query is made to each bureau:
eg. "http://www.related-links.com/wtgn?http://www.w3.org/" asks a
related-links bureau for related links about the W3C site.
Results are returned as an RDF graph encoded in XML.
Bandwidth-guzzling concerns aside, this is quite an interesting approach
compared to simply hardcoding an Alexa applet into the browser UI. It's
basically a simple version of the PICS Label Bureau model extended to
use RDF.
There's an example navcentr.rdf config file on the Mozilla site,
http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/navcntr.rdf that shows the basic setup...
RDF snippet (using the abbreviated version of RDF syntax):
[...]
<Topic id="NC:SmartBrowsingProviders">
<child href="http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?q=link%3A"
name="Who points to me?"
resultType="TEXT/HTML"/>
<child href="http://www-rl1.netscape.com/wtgn?" name="Related Links"
resultType="TEXT/RDF" />
</Topic>
[...]
So you'd switch Alexa or whoever on as related-link services by writing
their details into this graph. More (sketchy) SmartBrowsing docs at
http://www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/
A couple of questions bugging me about this...
- will all these extra http requests add significantly to web traffic?
- does the smart browsing model encourage vast ugly & monolithic 'all of
the web' indexes (Alexa, Altavista etc) or could we assemble useful
SmartBrowsing services from a federation of smaller metadata bureaus,
each holding quality catalogue entries for a few thousand URLs
appropriate to some subject area.
thinking out loud,
Dan
ps. here's the response from a smartbbrowsing query of
"http://www-rl1.netscape.com/wtgn?http://www.w3.org". Don't know whether
they're doing this using Alexa or some other database, but the links don't
seem all that closely related to me:
<RDF:RDF>
<RelatedLinks>
<aboutPage href="http://www.w3.org:80/"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://developer.netscape.com/openstudio/index.html?cp=related_w3org" name="Netscape Open Studio for site builders"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.hwg.org" name="Hwg"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.ietf.org" name="Ietf"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.internic.net" name="Internic"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.eff.org" name="Eff"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.whitehouse.gov" name="The White House"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.epic.org" name="Epic"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.linux.org" name="Welcome to the Linux Home Page"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.computer.org" name="Computer"/>
<child href="http://info.netscape.com/fwd/rl/http://www.ieee.org" name="Ieee"/>
<child instanceOf="Separator1"/>
<child href="http://excitesearch.netscape.com/search.gw?lk=excite_netcenter_us&search=w3" name="Search on this Topic..."/>
</RelatedLinks>
</RDF:RDF>