- Doug Bryan, A. Gershman. 1999. Opportunistic exploration of large consumer product spaces. Abstract: The advent of the Web has brought an unprecedented amount of information together with a large, diverse set of users. Online users are performing a wider variety of tasks than ever before. For example, not only is the Web being used to search conventional databases like Lexis/Nexus, it is also being used to broker Beanie Babies. Today’s common information seeking metaphors (i.e., keyword search and hypertext) cannot be expected to support all these new tasks well. We characterize a new user behavior called opportunistic exploration. We show how it is significantly different than both browsing and searching. A novel visual metaphor for opportunistic exploration, an aquarium, is presented. In an aquarium users may explore a large corpus at any level of granularity. The aquarium’s implementation is discussed and demonstrated on a collection of 12,000 consumer products. The implementation automatically controls granularity based on the history of operations performed by a user.
