i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

So, I know we've talked about visual representations of browser history before, and tonight, while reading lifehacker (ie, procrastinating for 202), I found two recommendations for firefox plug-ins. I just installed both of them.

The first, History Tree, looks awesome. It displays a simple visual history; it sorts by tabs, and includes backtracking as well as showing how you got from one page to another. I'm definitely going to be using this one.

Apparently this launched back in May, but I just noticed it when playing around with Google for this week's discussion.

The "wonder-wheel" takes the input query as the center of the wheel and produces a set of expansions and related terms as petals. Clicking on a related term moves out from the origin node and shows a new set of expansions - the original node shrinks in size and gets fainter. You can repeat this multiple times to branch out over a conceptual space. Search results show on the left (where the ads normally are). Here's a sample search for flower: