A Survey of Information Retrieval Interfaces

Information Processing and Management, 1993

We suggest that information retrieval is most appropriately considered as an inherently interactive process, and describe the design of an interface to a bibliographic information retrieval system that supports user interaction in an integrated fashion. A significant aspect of the interface design is its dependence upon a two-level hypertext model of information retrieval system databases, and the seamless support of a variety of information seeking strategies through the use of this model, and of a model of dimensions of information seeking behaviors. l method of interaction (scanning-searching); l goal of interaction (learning-selecting); l mode of retrieval (recognition-specification); and l resource considered (information items-meta-information).

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2001

In this paper, we propose a unified interface and a flexible architecture for querying various information sources on the Internet and the WWW using both a popular object model and a data model. We propose an Integrated Information Retrieval Ž. Ž. IIR service based on the Common Object Service Specification COSS for Common Object Request Broker Architecture Ž. Ž. Ž. CORBA and apply the Document Type Definition DTD of eXtensible Markup Language XML to define the metadata of information sources for sharing the ontology between mediator and wrappers. The objective of using the IIR design is not only to provide programmers with a uniform interface for coding a software application that can query a variety of information sources on the Internet, but also to create a flexible and extensible environment that easily allows system developers to add new or updated wrappers to the system.

Proceedings of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '96, 1996

Designing good user interfaces to information retrieval systems is a complex activity. The design space is large and evaluation methodologies that go beyond the classical precision and recall figures are not well established. In this paper we present an evaluation of an intelligent interface that covers also the user-system interaction and measures user's satisfaction. More specifically, we describe an experiment that evaluates: (i) the added value of the semiautomatic query reformulation implemented in a prototype system; (ii) the importance of technical, terminological, and strategic supports and (iii) the best way to provide them. The interpretation of results leads to guidelines for the design of user interfaces to information retrieval systems and to some observations on the evaluation issue.

Proceedings of the 23rd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '00, 2000

This article compares search effectiveness when using query-based lnternet search (via the Google search engine), directory-based search (via Yahoo) and phrasebased query reformulation assisted search (via the Hypefindex browser) by means of a controlled, userbased experimental study. The focus was to evaluate aspects of the search process. Cognitive load was • measured using a secondary digit-monitoring task to quantify the effort of the user in various search states; independent relevance judgements were employed to gauge the quality of the documents accessed during the search process. Time was monitored in various search states. Results indicated the directory-based search does not offer increased relevance over the query-based search (with or without query formulation assistance), and also takes longer. Query reformulation does significantly improve the relevance of the documents through which the user must trawl versus standard query-based internet search. However, the improvement in document relevance comes at the cost of increased search time and increased cognitive load. Keywords: navigation versus ad hoc search, monitoring user behaviour to improve search, field/empirical studies of the reformation seeking process, testing methodology. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that capias are not made or dtstributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a foe.

Proceedings of the 8th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '85, 1985

Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.

Computer, 2000

2009

Abstract Search result organisation and presentation is an important component of a Web search system, it can have a substantial impact on the ability of users to find useful information. In this study we compare the effectiveness of three publicly available search interfaces for supporting navigational search tasks. The three interfaces vary primarily in the proportion of visual versus textual cues that are used to display a search result.

2007

2010

Page 1. Search Engines Information Retrieval in Practice W. BRUCE CROFT University of Massachusetts, Amherst DONALD METZLER Yahoo! Research TREVOR STROHMAN Google Inc. Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City Sao Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo Page 2. Contents Search Engines and Information Retrieval 1 1.1 What Is Information Retrieval?