Patent ID: 7921140

Claim:
An apparatus for browsing contents, the apparatus comprising: a generation module to generate a plurality of key values using metadata of the contents, wherein each piece of content is assigned a key value from the plurality of key values; a management module to manage an index, the index includes a plurality of leaf nodes, each leaf node corresponds to a respective key value, and each leaf node includes one or more pointers that point to a physical location of the contents assigned to the key value that corresponds to the respective leaf node, wherein the number of pointers included in each leaf node is based on the amount of contents assigned to the key value associated with the respective leaf node; an output module to provide a user interface (UI) to enable a user to browse the contents to display the index including a plurality of shortcuts that correspond to the plurality of leaf nodes, wherein the displayed size of each shortcut is adjusted based on the number of pointers included in the corresponding leaf node of each shortcut; a processing module to search the index from a root node for the leaf node corresponding to the key value, when a shortcut corresponding to the leaf node and corresponding to the key value is selected by the user on the UI; and one or more processors to control the operation of the generation module, the management module, the output module, and the processing module.