Authors:
Kemal Efe
;
Alp V. Asutay
and
Arun Lakhotia
Affiliation:
Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana Lafayette, United States
Keyword(s):
Web navigation, interaction styles for data mining, graphical user interfaces, screen design, prototyping, theory and methods.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Multimedia and User Interfaces
;
Searching and Browsing
;
Usability and Ergonomics
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
;
Web Interfaces and Applications
Abstract:
We have implemented a novel user interface for Internet search engines that allows users to visualize the graph neighborhoods of search results returned. When the required information is not in the returned result set, it is likely that there is a path from one or more of the returned documents to another document that has the required information. Our proposed interface allows exploring these paths. We performed experiments to measure users’ level of success in finding desired information. Given equal time to perform a set of search tasks, on average, the users of our interface were able to find twice as many of the required documents as the users of a traditional interface, using the same underlying search engine. We also found that, on average, users of the proposed interface tried 31% fewer queries per search task.