Visualization of search results

2000

This paper discusses the evaluation of a visual information seeking system for the Web called INSYDER. The aim of INSYDER is to find business information on the Web. The evaluation compares different visualizations including HTML-List, ResultTable, ScatterPlot, BarGraph and SegmentViews. These visualizations support the interpretation of the search result phase of the information seeking process. First results of the evaluation with forty users are presented and an outlook on future work is given.

Journal of the American Society for …, 2001

mariandoerk.de

During my doctoral research I investigate how visual exploration affects information seeking on the Web. I am particularly interested in the role of interactive visualization in exploratory search interfaces, development of web-based systems, and new ways of information seeking. In this research overview, I provide an introduction to my research topic, outline prior related work, discuss my methodology and challenges, and present a timeline for my research progress.

The organisation, content and presentation of document surrogates has a substantial impact on the effectiveness of web search result interfaces. Most interfaces include textual information, including for example the document title, URL, and a short query-biased summary of the content. Other interfaces include additional browsing features, such as topic clustering, or thumbnails of the web pages. In this study we analyse three search interfaces, and compare the effectiveness of textual information and additional browsing features. Our analysis indicates that most users spend a substantially larger proportion of time looking at text information, and that those interfaces that focus on text-based representations of document content tend to lead to quicker task completion times for named-page finding search tasks.

1999

In this paper we study a visualization system for the purpose of helping the user to locate interesting material in the retrieved data. The system works by placing the documents into 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensional space and positioning them according to the inter-document similarity. We compute the quality of the visualization by simulating a user searching for the relevant material and calculating average precision of that search. We compare the numbers for the visualization with the same measure taken for traditional ranked list. We show that the visualization performs { on average { signi cantly better than ranked list. We show a signi cant advantage of multidimensional visualizations over the 1 dimensional one. We also show that the di erence between 2 and 3 dimensional visualizations is very small.

International Journal of Human-Computer …, 2000

An integrated visual thesaurus and result browser to support information retrieval was designed using a task model of information searching. The system provided a hierarchical thesaurus with a results cluster display representing similarity between retrieved documents and relevance ranking using a bullseye metaphor. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) was used as the retrieval engine and to calculate the similarity between documents. The design was tested with two information retrieval tasks. User behaviour, performance and attitude were recorded as well as usability problems. The system had few usability problems and users liked the visualisations, but recall performance was poor. The reasons for poor/good performance were investigated by examining user behaviour and search strategies. Better searchers used the visualisations more effectively and spent longer on the task, whereas poorer performances were attributable to poor motivation, difficulty in assessing article relevance and poor use of system visualisations. Furthermore, the bullseye display appeared to encourage limited evaluation of article relevance on titles, leading to poor performance. The bullseye display metaphor for article relevance was understood by users; however, they were confused by the concept of similarity searching expressed as visual clusters. The conclusions from the study are that while visual user interfaces for information searching might seem to be usable, they may not actually improve performance. Extensive training and advisor facilities to propose effective search strategies need to be incorporated with visual information retrieval systems.

International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, 2011

Most conventional web search engines return a small fraction of results per display in textual format. Such renderings require the user to scroll over multiple pages to find relevant results. To enhance the user's ability to identify relevant documents among large sets of results, visualisation techniques are suggested. In addition, integrating the user in the process of query reformulation -by visualising the process itself -can lead to more relevant search results. This paper explores research concerned with visualising the processes of query reformulation and results rendering in web search, and provides research recommendations for further investigations of how best to integrate visualisation into web information retrieval.

2000

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The widespread use of text-based search in user interfaces has led designers in visualization to occasionally add search functionality to their creations. Yet it remains unclear how search may impact a person's behavior. Given the unstructured context of the web, users may not have explicit informationseeking goals and designers cannot make assumptions about user attention. To bridge this gap, we observed the impact of integrating search with five visualizations across 830 online participants. In an unguided task, we find that (1) the presence of text-based search influences people's information-seeking goals, (2) search can alter the data that people explore and how they engage with it, and (3) the effects of search are amplified in visualizations where people are familiar with the underlying dataset. These results suggest that text-search in web visualizations drives users towards more diverse information seeking goals, and may be valuable in a range of existing visualization designs.

2004

When searching on the web, users often reformulate their queries after viewing the results and viewing some of the pages. After one or two reformulations the user may implicitly realize patterns and relationships between the multiple search results. We believe that these patterns can be used to identify interesting results. We have developed the prototype Search Engine Similarity (SES) tool which explicitly visualizes the similarity between multiple searches. In this paper we describe an experiment to determine whether explicitly visualizing the relationships between multiple searches will let users browse more effectively. Our results show that explicit difference visualizations can enhance the search process for some tasks.