PARC has developed a new computing solution. Enhanced Thumbnails is a “proprietary visualization technique that makes it easier to find relevant content quickly within documents and document collections”.
I found that their solution for online searching particularly effective. You can clearly see the pages that have a high content relationship to the term you were looking for. It seems very intuitive and effective, although with a very large recordset returning, I don't know. For a local site search I think this would be really useful. Talk about user success at a task. You're combining skimming, highlighting, visual feedback and taking the surprise out of what you're going to click on.
The web browsing solution seems a little different, providing an enhanced thumbnail overview on the left side of the page, that allows almost like the "navigator" palette within Photoshop. (I never use that palette). But for internal page searching it could be the beginning of a nice solution.
If I had a PC, I'd download and play with this some more. Anybody out there that has played with this?