Two Visions of the Web: from Globality to Localities

This paper presents two different perspectives of the Web: a global one that corresponds to the classical approach of search engines and a local one that we propose as an alternative approach. The search engines perform their indexing operation on the whole Web in an automatic way and display their results according to it by proposing a perfectible visualization. We review the usability of these visualizations while examining the way search engines build their hierarchies. That leads us to reconsider the notion of context and the way models of the Web influence our vision of it to finally propose a new model strongly related to its perception through alternative visualizations