Tools currently available are primitive:

• baskets (bookmarks and favorites in browsers),
• nets on handles (to fetch a sighted URL through a browser), and
• hands and pointers to cut-and-paste URLs into lists.

Our tool set, dubbed twURL, is designed for the information analyst who needs high-powered support to take up where search engines and browsers leave off. twURL is a stand-alone Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP application that the power user can apply many ways:

• profile the distribution of URLs across Internet domains and websites

to answer questions such as: where's the most action? is there both commercial and educational interest? is the topic influential internationally and in which countries?
• extract thumbnail descriptions of web pages

so that: the collection can be scanned without reading every web page, already read webpages are easily remembered, and annotations can be attached to URLs in HTML reports
• highlight the pages and sites most frequently referenced

to: drill down on the most influential organizations and authors, identify the possible authorities in relevant fields, and call out the clusters of separate groups or sub-topics
• identify pages that use certain key terms in their high level text (title, preface, headings, links)

to: provide entry points to the collection (like looking up a page in a back-of-the-book index), help filter out pages due to search engine confusion or overlapping terminology
• attach ratings according to user-defined schemes (not just pornographic, but also technical classifications and quality judgments)

to: qualify URLs worth saving or recommended for others, provide an audit trail assuring that URLs have been viewed or disposed
• turn lists of URLs into annotated, inter-linked, edited HTML reports

thus: providing different views for different users, a standard means of exchanging categorized links viewed in any browser
• automate browsers

to: speed up viewing lists of URLs, allow the user to concentrate on decisions rather than clicking links, and provide VCR-like control over a browser versus the current browsers' control over the user

1. URL Base, a database structure to save, query, and reload collections of URLs
2. Windows outline manager for browsing, filtering, and editing URL collections (like the TreeView in Windows Explorer with dozens of more powerful operations)
3. import parsers, input URLs from HTML (e.g. search engine results pages), XML (e.g. Bullseye), .csv (WebFerret) and other formats
4. analysis algorithms and data structures for extracting different views of the underlying URL base
5. visualization mechanisms , hierarchical TreeView, tabular Listview, text annotations, and simple pie and bar charts to show numerical distributions of URLs
6. report generators

• There's more than one way to browse a collection of URLs --

twURL adds "contexts" (domains, links, vocabularies) to make browsing more productive. Current MOSAIC-derived browsers have frozen a set of limited capabilities and abandoned real browsing improvements, leaving an eventual opening for new ideas after the current browser wars are over
• URL collections have many statistics that provide insights for analytic professionals--

twURL counts and classifies URLs myriad ways, to identify significant metrics and their visualizations. Power users need and will appreciate capabilities that carry them beyond today's unautomated, flat view of URLs and browsing.
• Current user interfaces can support far more interaction and automate many rudimentary editing operations--

twURL's "URL Explorer" extensions of the Windows TreeView offer the computer-agile analyst powerful new ways of directly manipulating information. Future speech input and output will speed up and augment current operations, e.g. reading off contexts or obeying "next" commands.
• The Web is starting to evolve toward more structured information management --

Power users will want more automated URL management than today's browsers and associated utilities provide. The professional who can combine expertise, analytic power, and high productivity will move higher on the chain of costlier, value-added information products.

1. standalone desktop application, or the flagship of a suite of other web utilities (downloaders, embedded browsers, databases, graphics), or an analytic add-on to current metasearcher power tools such as Copernic and Bullseye
2. set of components that can automate existing or desired processes for high-powered users, e.g. to speed up the way a journalist checks facts, systematize and demonstrate coverage for licensing or investment personnel, or handle the citations for a corporate librarian's daily report on the company's intranet
3. base for producing high-quality information products as a service, e.g. web-books, competitive intelligence reports, reference collections for industry standards
4. link page builder that exploits the concentrated, keyword-rich, link-heavy nature of twURL reports (our website has reached the top 5 of several search engines on one query)