A novel facility in hypermedia systems is proposed to provide search using queries. The search mechanism is shown to complement linking, making the creation of rich linked structures easier. A prototype hypermedia system that provides search is described, and user experiences to date and some future directions are discussed.>

The Telesophy system is intended to provide transparent access to all of a community's online information. The scale of the system requires that it be distributed across many machines via a network; the multiple types and formats of the information require that it be a multimedia system. We describe a prototype that uses objects to represent, query, display, and edit information. A two-level storage system is used to store the objects on multiple servers; queries are processed by indexing servers layered on top of the storage system. New media types and new indexing schemes can be added simply by defining new classes within the existing framework.