A comparative web browser (CWB) for browsing and comparing web pages

In this paper, we propose a new type of Web browser, called the Comparative Web Browser(CWB), which concurrently presents multiple Web pages in a way that enables the content of the Web pages to be automatically synchronized. The ability to view multiple Web pages at one time is useful when we wish to make a comparison on the Web, such as when we compare similar products or news articles from different newspapers. The CWB is characterized by (1) automatic content-based retrieval of passages from another Web page based on a passage of the Web page the user is reading, and (2) automatic transformation of a user's behavior (scrolling, clicking, or moving backward or forward) on a Web page into a series of behaviors on the other Web pages. The CWB tries to concurrently present "similar" passages from different Web pages, and for this purpose our CWB automatically navigates Web pages that contain passages similar to those of the initial Web page. Furthermore, we propose an enhancement to the CWB, which enables it to use linkage information to find related documents based on link structure.