Described is system that characterizes segments of document with one or more keyphrases and then uses keyphrases to help users find interesting parts of document. Keyphrases are displayed with information about the location of the phrase in the document and are used as pointers to quickly move to from overview to section of potential interest. In another implementation, when there are many documents in a collection, inventive multi-document view can be used to reduce number of documents presented, helping user to more efficiently find documents of interest. In this view, a user (possibly repeatedly) filters documents displayed based on metadata values. In one implementation, icons corresponding to documents are displayed on a display device together with metadata corresponding to the documents. When the value of the metadata is selected by the user, display state of the icons corresponding to document is varied based on selected value of metadata.