Intelligent web navigation using virtual assistants

Some time ago, companies and organizations did not store very much information about themselves on the Internet. However, the Web has evolved a lot over the last years and websites contain more and more information. In many cases, that information is not well organized and users have to waste their time looking for what they want to know using the traditional menu-driven navigation and keyword search that websites provide. This decreases users' interest in surfing websites and hence in finding out about companies. One way to resolve this problem is to change the structure of websites. However, if a company has just spent a lot of money on redesigning its website or it simply likes its current design, it will refuse to change the way contents are organized. For this reason, we propose a real time Virtual Assistant, which can work together with any existing website, to help users find the information that they look for. Preliminary experiments have shown that Virtual Assistants can outperform traditional navigation.