WEB PAGE NAVIGATION AND WEB SEARCHING

WEB NAVIGATION

Web navigation refers to the process of navigating a network of information resources in the World Wide Web, which is organized as hypertext or hypermedia.The user interface that is used to do so is called a web browser.A central theme in web design is the development of a web navigation interface that maximizes usability.A website's overall navigational scheme includes several navigational pieces such as global, local, supplemental, and contextual navigation; all of these are vital aspects of the broad topic of web navigation. Hierarchical navigation systems are vital as well since it is the primary navigation system. It allows for the user to navigate within the site using levels alone, which is often seen as restricting and requires additional navigation systems to better structure the website. The global navigation of a website, as another segment of web navigation, serves as the outline and template in order to achieve an easy maneuver for the users accessing the site, while local navigation is often used to help the users within a specific section of the site.All these navigational pieces fall under the categories of various types of web navigation, allowing for further development and for more efficient experiences upon visiting a webpage. 

Types of web navigation

The use of website navigation tools allow for a website's visitors to experience the site with the most efficiency and the least incompetence. A website navigation system is analogous to a road map which enables webpage visitors to explore and discover different areas and information contained within the website.

There are many different types of website navigation:

• Hierarchical website navigation

The structure of the website navigation is built from general to specific. This provides a clear, simple path to all the web pages from anywhere on the website.

• Global website navigation

Global website navigation shows the top level sections/pages of the website. It is available on each page and lists the main content sections/pages of the website.

• Local website navigation

Local navigation is the links within the text of a given web page, linking to other pages within the website.

STYLES OF WEBSITE NAVIGATION

Styles of website navigation refers to how the navigation system is presented.

• Text Links

Text links are words (text) which are surrounded by the anchor set of tags to create clickable text which takes the visitor to another web page within your website, a downloadable document from your website, or to another website on the Internet.

• Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb navigation shows the website visitor the path within your website to the page they are currently on.

• Navigation Bar

A navigation bar is the collection of website navigation links all grouped together. A navigation bar can be horizontal or vertical.

• Tab Navigation

Tab navigation is where the website navigations links appear as tabs, similar to the tabs you use in a binder to divide the contents into sections.

• Sitemap

A sitemap is a page within your website that lists all the sections and web pages (if you don’t have too many) that are contained within the website. This is different from Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Sitemaps.

A traditional sitemap provides navigation for your website visitors should they get lost, a shorter path to the different areas of the website for those who know what exactly they are looking for and a means for the search engines to find all the pages within your website.

• Dropdown Menu

A dropdown menu is a style of website navigation where when the visitor places their mouse over a menu item, another menu is exposed. A dropdown menu can include a flyout menu (see next item).

A dropdown menu system can create accessibility issues and a problem as far as the search engines not being able to read the links in the menu, but if constructed properly, these issues can be overcome.

• Flyout Menu

A flyout menu is constructed similar to the dropdown menu. When the visitor places their mouse over a link, another menu “flys out”, usually to the right, from the link where the mouse is placed.

Flyout menus face the same challenges as dropdown menus but if constructed properly, they can be accessible and readable by the search engines.

• Named Anchors

Named anchors are the type of links that take you directly to a spot on the current page or on another web page.

WEB NAVIGATION USE

To be effective, the website navigation system needs:

• To be consistent throughout the website.

The website visitors will learn, through repetition, how to get around the website.

• The main navigation links kept together.

This makes it easier for the visitor to get to the main areas of the website.

• Reduced clutter by grouping links into sections.

If the list of website navigation links are grouped into sections and each section has only 5-7 links, this will make it easier to read the navigation scheme.

• Minimal clicking to get to where the visitor wants to get to.

If the number of clicks to the web page the visitor wishes to visit is minimal, this leads to a better experience.

Some visitors can become confused or impatient when clicking a bunch of links to get to where they want to be. In large websites, this can be difficult to reduce. Using breadcrumbs is one way to help the visitor see where they are within the website and the path back up the navigation path they took.

Creating the website navigation system at the planning stage of the website will effect the overall design of the web page layout and help develop the overall plan for the website.

A 'web search engine' is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.

Web search engines get their information by web crawling from site to site. The "spider" checks for the standard filename robots.txt, addressed to it, before sending certain information back to be indexed depending on many factors, such as the titles, page content, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), headings, as evidenced by the standard HTML markup of the informational content, or its metadata in HTML meta tags. "[N]o web crawler may actually crawl the entire reachable web. Due to infinite websites, spider traps, spam, and other exigencies of the real web, crawlers instead apply a crawl policy to determine when the crawling of a site should be deemed sufficient. Some sites are crawled exhaustively, while others are crawled only partially".Indexing means associating words and other definable tokens found on web pages to their domain names and HTML-based fields. The associations are made in a public database, made available for web search queries. A query from a user can be a single word. The index helps find information relating to the query as quickly as possible.Some of the techniques for indexing, and caching are trade secrets, whereas web crawling is a straightforward process of visiting all sites on a systematic basis.Between visits by the spider, the cached version of page (some or all the content needed to render it) stored in the search engine working memory is quickly sent to an inquirer. If a visit is overdue, the search engine can just act as a web proxy instead. In this case the page may differ from the search terms indexed.The cached page holds the appearance of the version whose words were indexed, so a cached version of a page can be useful to the web site when the actual page has been lost, but this problem is also considered a mild form of linkrot.

High-level architecture of a standard Web crawle.Typically when a user enters a query into a search engine it is a few keywords. The index already has the names of the sites containing the keywords, and these are instantly obtained from the index. The real processing load is in generating the web pages that are the search results list: Every page in the entire list must be weighted according to information in the indexes.Then the top search result item requires the lookup, reconstruction, and markup of the snippets showing the context of the keywords matched. These are only part of the processing each search results web page requires, and further pages (next to the top) require more of this post processing.Beyond simple keyword lookups, search engines offer their own GUI- or command-driven operators and search parameters to refine the search results. These provide the necessary controls for the user engaged in the feedback loop users create by filtering and weighting while refining the search results, given the initial pages of the first search results. For example, from 2007 the Google.com search engine has allowed one to filter by date by clicking "Show search tools" in the leftmost column of the initial search results page, and then selecting the desired date range. It's also possible to weight by date because each page has a modification time. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to help end users refine the search query. Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search, which allows users to define the distance between keywords.There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. As well, natural language queries allow the user to type a question in the same form one would ask it to a human. A site like this would be ask.com.The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve. There are two main types of search engine that have evolved: one is a system of predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords that humans have programmed extensively. The other is a system that generates an "inverted index" by analyzing texts it locates. This first form relies much more heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work.Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and thus some of them allow advertisers to have their listings ranked higher in search results for a fee. Search engines that do not accept money for their search results make money by running search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.

Although search engines are programmed to rank websites based on some combination of their popularity and relevancy, empirical studies indicate various political, economic, and social biases in the information they provide and the underlying assumptions about the technology.These biases can be a direct result of economic and commercial processes (e.g., companies that advertise with a search engine can become also more popular in its organic search results), and political processes (e.g., the removal of search results to comply with local laws). For example, Google will not surface certain neo-Nazi websites in France and Germany, where Holocaust denial is illegal.Biases can also be a result of social processes, as search engine algorithms are frequently designed to exclude non-normative viewpoints in favor of more "popular" results. Indexing algorithms of major search engines skew towards coverage of U.S.-based sites, rather than websites from non-U.S. countries.Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons.Several scholars have studied the cultural changes triggered by search engines, and the representation of certain controversial topics in their results, such as terrorism in Ireland and conspiracy theories.