The design of hyperlinks, search engines, and browsers as well as many documents found in the Internet centers around first finding and then displaying desired content. This is what those components mainly do. Efficiently, conveniently, and reliably finding information and displaying it are core guiding design goals of the whole of the Internet and its components. Improvements in any aspect of these processes are earnestly sought.
Hyperlinks enable navigating from one document to another and are the feature of hypertext for finding additional related information by just one or a few actions on the part of a user. In effect a linked document is part of the information provided by referencing documents. However, linked documents may be detrimentally altered or become inaccessible. Modifying a document can make some or all links to that document inappropriate. Transient network conditions can make hyperlinks temporarily useless. Hyperlinks can become permanently useless when targeted documents or domains are intentionally or inadvertently removed from a network—a condition called linkrot.
Individual documents found on the Internet can be large, and user agents (typically Internet browsers) provide users with functionality similar to document editors for finding content. Typically, a user can type an arbitrary string, or copy an arbitrary string, into a “find” box of a browser and then search for that string. Often, he will copy text from the document itself into a “find” box, and search for additional instances in that same document. Also, he will copy content from the document and paste it into a search query to be sent to the search engine, in order to find instances of that content in other documents. A user may also open other documents and search for content that he found elsewhere in those documents.
When searching on the Internet using a search engine service, a user might enter the query string “brown cow”; in response the search engine service will typically return a document with several hyperlinks to web pages that the search engine service deems relevant. A search engine service also typically presents evidence of the relevance of the document represented by at least some of the hyperlinks, in the form of snippets constructed from the document's contents presented in proximity to the hyperlink for that document. For example, one document might have an associated snippet that reads, “how now brown cow.” The user can read this snippet evidence, and further evaluate the relevance of that particular document to his actual intentions—which typically are not entirely captured by the interpretation of the query. Having determined that he wants to see the content of a document represented by a hyperlink in the search results, the user then clicks on the hyperlink and in response the browser presents or displays the content of the document.