Facilitating search through visualized results

Abstract

This paper presents a search engine interface enriching search results with thumbnails of documents such as reports, presentation materials, spreadsheets, and so on. Usual search results consist of text information, such as the title and its snippet of each document. Our interface adds the thumbnails of documents listed in search results for assisting the search processes of users. We evaluate the interface on a web site search engine. The experimental results show that our interface enables users to find their target documents more efficiently than using an interface without thumbnails. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.