User interaction with novel web search interfaces

2008

2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops, 2007

Although significant efforts have been devoted to the study and evaluation of information retrieval systems from an algorithmic perspective, far less work has been performed on the evaluation of these systems from the user's perspective. This is certainly the case for Web information retrieval, where the major search engines continue to utilise interfaces that have not changed substantially since their introduction. One of the challenges in developing new Web search interfaces is the evaluation of these systems in comparison to one another, as well as in comparison to the popular Web search engines. In this paper, we highlight some of the methods used in the literature for evaluating Web search systems, and present a summary of the methods that we have found to be effective in dealing with the challenges of evaluating intelligent and interactive Web search interfaces.

Proceedings of the 2004 joint ACM/IEEE conference on Digital libraries - JCDL '04, 2004

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on New Development in Digital Libraries, NDDL 2001, 2001

The number of textual databases, which include many full text documents, has increased in the last few years. This has taken place mainly on the Internet both in the number of databases and their scope. The purpose of this essay is to present a comparative study which took place at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with post coordinated textual retrieval systems. The comparison carried out was between the conventional interfaces for search engines used on the Internet and a new interface developed for this study. The study itself examined the behavior of database users in carrying out various search tasks using different interfaces which display a list of the search results for defined tasks. A comparison was made between the behavior of the users of different interfaces. The findings of the study show a clear advantage for the interface which was developed for the experiment over popular interfaces used on the Internet for similar purposes, in terms of ease of use, sense of confidence of the user while carrying out the task and his feeling about the degree of relevance of the information displayed by the interface in carrying out his task.

Journal of the American Society for …, 2009

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2006

The authors describe a set of best practices that were developed to assist in the design of search user interfaces. Search user interfaces represent a challenging design domain because novices who have no desire to learn the mechanics of search engine architecture or algorithms often use them. These can lead to frustration and task failure when it is not addressed by the user interface. The best practices are organized into five domains: the corpus, search algorithms, user and task context, the search interface, and mobility. In each section the authors present an introduction to the design challenges related to the domain and a set of best practices for creating a user interface that facilitates effective use by a broad population of users and tasks.

Journal of The American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2002

This article compares search effectiveness when using query-based Internet search (via the Google search engine), directory-based search (via Yahoo), and phrasebased query reformulation-assisted search (via the Hyperindex browser) by means of a controlled, user-based 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 and time was monitored as a function of search state. Results indicated 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, particularly when the formulation of query terms is more difficult. However, the improvement in document relevance comes at the cost of increased search time, although this difference is quite small when the search is self-terminated. In addition, the advantage of the query reformulation seems to occur as a consequence of providing more discriminating terms rather than by increasing the length of queries.

2007

Technical Report No. 2000-34of the Leibniz Center for Research in Computer Science, 2000

The number of textual databases which include many full text documents has increased in the last few years. This has taken place mainly on the Internet both in the number of databases and their scope. The purpose of this essay is to present a comparative study which took place at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with post coordinated textual retrieval systems. The comparison carried out was between the conventional interfaces for search engines used on the Internet and a new interface developed for this study. The study itself examined the behavior of databases users in carrying out various search tasks using different interfaces which display a list of the search results for defined tasks. A comparison was made between the behavior of the users of different interfaces. The findings of the study show a clear advantage for the interface which was developed for the experiment over popular interfaces used on the Internet for similar purposes, in terms of ease of use, sense of confidence of the user while carrying out the task and his feeling about the degree of relevance of the information displayed by the interface in carrying out his task.

2006