Techniques for browsing through a large collection of content portions uses a scatter and gather approach where a collection of content portions is clustered into one or more clusters using multi-modal data modeling. Additionally, as part of the multi-modal data modeling, "proximal cues" surrounding links or connections or surrounding "image links" in a content portion are used to quickly identify the user's information needs. Thus, taking into account proximal cues during multi-modal data modeling improves the scattering and the gathering process, as well as personalizes the scattering and the gathering process to most effectively cluster content portions of interest to the user.