A treemap-based result interface for search engine users

Abstract

Search engines and metasearch engines on the World Wide Web typically display representative information such as the result document titles and snippets in a one-dimensional ranked list. Alternatively, a few others such as Clusty and Kartoo cluster their results so mat users can, to a certain extent, interact with documents, keywords and/or clusters. The number of documents that can be effectively presented in one screen is usually limited to between 10 and 20. In this paper, we propose a method based on treemap visualization mat substantially improve the information compactness. In addition, it provides a few unique post-search interaction methods that enable a user to manage a large number of results. An online prototype system is built. Various experiments are designed and done to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness and usability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.