Successful information search requires a joint effort from both syntactic matching provided by current search engines and semantic matching performed by human users. Word-based syntactic matching schemes work well for tasks such as homepage finding or fact finding, but they are less effective in supporting exploratory search tasks such as learning and investigation. One way to overcome this limitation of syntactic matching is to capture the search journeys of other users with semantically related queries, and use them as a roadmap to guide exploratory search. This paper presents our investigation on the utilization of query semantics derived from query logs, to 1) increase the diversity of a search result; and 2) devise new interfaces that display a search result to support exploratory search. We conducted a user study to evaluate our initial interface prototypes. The evaluation shows that, with the interface that explicitly supports their task, subjects acquire more knowledge and are more confident about their task completeness. The differences between subjects ’ preferences suggest that we may need to provide a range of interfaces that can not only support users ’ search tasks, but also suit their personal styles.

One of the key motivating factors for information providers to use personalisation is to maximise the benefit to the user in accessing their content. However, traditionally such systems have focussed on mainly corporate or professionally authored content and have not been able to leverage the benefits of other material already on the web, written about that subject by other authors. Such information includes open-web information as well as usergenerated content such as forums, blogs, tags, etc. By providing personalised compositions and presentations across these heterogeneous information sources, a potentially richer user experience can be created, leveraging the mutual benefits of professionally authored content as well as open-web information and active user communities. This paper presents novel techniques and architectures that extend