Technology Opportunities

Available Knowhow

Commercial Advantages:

Customers typically value the experience of other customers, and use such information to guide their actions. Being able to provide such data will therefore boost the appeal of an WWW index site. Vendors with indexes of their products will benefit from first-hand information regarding user responses to their products.

General Background:

WWW Index sites contain many links, but typically no ranking (except perhaps subjective ranking by the editors of the index site). Thus each user must search for himself, without the benefit of experience of previous users -- all such experience, both good and bad, is lost. The invention provides a mechanism for users to express their feedback as part of normal activity. The system then displays a summary of this feedback for the benefit of subsequent users.

Current Status:

A laboratory prototype WWW server, embodying the above ideas, is operational.

Future Plans:

Create a full-scale bibliographic index of a scientific domain and make it available to the scientific community.

Applications and Potential Markets:

The invention is expected to be useful in situations where large volumes of pages are maintained and visited by many users. Examples include WWW indexing services, vendor web sites with product information, and on-line shops offering merchandise.