VISUALIZING THE WEB SEARCH RESULTS WITH WEB
SEARCH VISUALIZATION USING SCATTER PLOT

Md. Renesa Nizamee
Graduate Student
Department of Computer Science
Memorial University of Newfoundland
mrn271@mun.ca


Md. Asaduzzaman Shojib
The Jaxara IT Ltd
Bangladesh

asad_iut@yahoo.com


ABSTRACT

We live in 21st century, a time when the speed of flow of
information is the indicator of the quality of life. Therefore, it is
rightly called the century of information. We need information in
our everyday life, but we need to get it in bulk, with ease and with
assured quality. The best and easiest way to get it is through the
World Wide Web. Although there are a good number of search
engines available in web, the most commonly used ones show the
search result in a list based representation. This list based
representation is not very user friendly for the users all the time.
Sometimes they don’t get their desired results easily and there is
not enough scope for the user to compare documents, find
relevant documents and filter according to their needs. Web
search visualization using scatter plot provides the users to search
their documents and the results will be visualized in a traditional
list based representation and also in a scatter plot according to the
documents’ last modification date and document type.
Keywords

Web search visualization, Information visualization, Scatter plot

1. INTRODUCTION

With the advent of information technology and increase of
information in the current era of information, our social and
industrial life is gradually submerging in massive online
information. In this vast ocean of information, search engines are
essential to help us maneuver this vast availability properly.
Search engines are indeed a valuable gift of modern computer
science that has changed our way of accessing, managing and
using information. Although a lot of efforts have gone by to create
search engines that can index billions of documents and return
them in a fraction of seconds [3]; however the interface has not
substantially changed from the early days of these web search
engines. Still the results are delivered in a list based representation
with 10 results per page usually. Users have to shift through a
great number of results which are not often relevant to their
interests.

A study [8] from 2006 shows that 88% of users will try a new
search if they do not find what they seek in the first three pages.
That means in a usual search interface the users would review 30
results and then they will start a new search with a different query
or they will modify their previous query to get a different set of
search results.

To address the shortcomings in the conventional web search
interfaces, Web search visualization using scatter plot has been
developed. It uses the concept of information visualization to
visualize two of the search results attributes, the last modification
year and the document type. These two attributes are plotted in a
2D scatter plot. User can visualize these two attributes from the
scatter plot and also they can see the conventional list based
representation of the search results.

The motivation behind this work is to give the user some scope to
see the relation between the search results in respect to their last
modified year and the document type. They can compare and
analyze the data and find the relevant ones from the list based
search result. Suppose the user wants some search results which
are last modified in the year 2009, then they can see the scatter
plot to find which search results are last modified in 2009. After
that they can select them or wish to view them from the actual
results which are represented in the conventional list based
representation. They also can search for a number of document
types like pdf, ms office, and html files for a range of years by the
information given in the scatter plot.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: An overview
and taxonomy of the existing web search visualization techniques
is provided in Section 2. In Section 3, the details of Web search


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