Results can be kept along with the original text to make persistent collections of links and association text. This overcomes problems in query formulation and loss of relevant information due to document alteration. Browsing, hierarchical menus, and keyword searches provide access to information.
Some searches require mathematical-like syntax in order to bring back meaningful search results.
A problem with the present search based WWW information retrieval is that it does not support a novice who cannot categorise, or recognise keywords to retrieve information and is unfamiliar with the use of search engines. Altavista's Java based category browser tries to improve on this by providing a graphical network-like term structure. If a user is learning a topic domain, however, the ability to describe the desired information and relationships in the topic domain is limited. Web search results are normally a set of links and a selection of pages as targets. Storing these pages is required to keep the links, while relationships to the ideas and the information which prompted a query, is lost entirely.