Allison Woodruff is a user interface research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), formerly known as Xerox PARC, where the graphical interface was invented. Woodruff's current research is focused on developing search applications using Web Thumbnails.
What are Web Thumbnails?
People spend a lot of time looking for documents on the Web, but the process isn't easy or fast enough. Google, for example, does good search rankings but still returns text summaries, which take a lot of time to scan and don't provide information about what a page looks like.
What we do with our Web Thumbnails is return a set of small screenshots of the pages themselves, and if you click on one of the pictures, it takes you to the page, just as a Web link would. Keywords within the picture are blown up to large size in the thumbnail view, so you can get a feel for how relevant the document's text is to your search.
Can this technology have applications other than Web searching?
Web Thumbnails could benefit search engines, but they could also have interface applications for navigating a computer's file system. We're also working on software called Popout Prism that can provide a thumbnail view of how a large document looks at the same time that you see the document itself.
A demonstration of Web Thumbnails is available here.