In Common Sense - Rethinking Web Search Results

The World Wide Web is a rich annotation system which allows people to relate to documents and sites from different perspectives. People describe, comment, relate or mock other Web pages in the context of their document. This richness is currently not reflected in snippets presented by Web search engines, where a search result is represented by the text found in the Web document alone. This paper proposes a new method for representing documents in Web search engines' results. This method is based on recent trends in search engine technology and provides descriptions of the retrieved documents, assembled from people's commentary and annotations on the Web. This paper suggests a new way for automatically retrieving and reusing people's annotations on the Web, incorporating these annotations into a search engine for creating a hybrid directory-search-engine, allowing for both automatic retrieval and on-the-fly human authored summaries.