Patent ID: 8549441

Claim:
A method for presenting and navigating content objects having varying properties, the method comprising: displaying a user interface control for selecting one or more providers, wherein the one or more providers comprise one or more network search providers and one or more local search providers, the one or more local search providers comprising one or more program modules executing on a search client computer, the one or more program modules being configured to search for at least one of indexed, locally-stored content objects and non-indexed, locally-stored content objects; receiving a selection in the user interface control of the one or more providers by which the search for content objects should be made; causing a search for the content objects to be made by the selected one or more providers; receiving one or more content objects from the selected one or more providers in response to the search, the one or more content objects each having metadata associated therewith that matches one or more search terms of the search, wherein the metadata associated with each content object corresponds to a type of content object; displaying each content object separately from a first document within which the content object is contained; filtering the displayed content objects using the metadata; receiving a selection of one of the displayed content objects; displaying the first document within which the selected content object is contained, determining whether each displayed content object has been selected for insertion into a second document; and inserting each selected content object into the second document.