Users of Web search engines are often forced to sift through the long ordered list of document "snippets" returned by the engines. The IR community has explored document clustering as an alternative method of organizing retrieval results, but clustering has yet to be deployed on most major search engines. The NorthernLight search engine organizes its output into "custom folders" based on pre-computed document labels, but does not reveal how the folders are generated or how well they correspond to users' interests. In this paper, we introduce Grouper -- an interface to the results of the HuskySearch meta-search engine, which dynamically groups the search results into clusters labeled by phrases extracted from the snippets. In addition, we report on the first empirical comparison of user Web search behavior on a standard ranked-list presentation versus a clustered presentation. By analyzing HuskySearch logs, we are able to demonstrate substantial differences in the number of documents f...

Although there have been many prototypes of visualization in support of information retrieval, there has been little systematic evaluation that distinguishes the benefits of the visualization per se from that of various accompanying features. The current study focuses on such an evaluation of NIRVE, a tool that supports visualization of search results. Insofar as possible, functionally equivalent 3D, 2D, and text versions of NIRVE were implemented. Nine novices and six professional users completed a series of information-seeking tasks on a set of retrieved documents. There were high interface costs for the 3D visualization, although those costs decreased substantially with experience. Performance was best when the tool's properties matched task demands; only under the right combination of task, user, and interface did 3D visualization result in performance comparable to functionally matched 2D and textual tools. Keywords Information Visualization, 3D, 2D, text, Evaluation, Interface ...

We built two Information Retrieval systems that were targeted for the TREC-6 "aspect oriented " retrieval track. The systems were built to test the usefulness of different visualizations in an interactive IR setting---in particular, an "aspect window" for the chosen task, and a 3-D visualization of document inter-relationships. We studied 24 users of the system in order to investigate: whether the systems were more effective than a control system, whether experienced users outperformed novices, whether spatial reasoning ability was a good predictor of effective use of 3-D, and whether the systems could be compared indirectly via a control system. Our results show substantial differences in user performance are related to spatial reasoning ability and to a lesser degree other traits. We also obtained markedly different results from the direct and indirect comparisons. 1 Introduction We are interested in building and evaluating high quality information retrieval and organization tools....

Searching for useful information on the World Wide Web has become increasingly difficult. While Internet search engines have been helping people to search on the web, low recall rate and outdated indexes have become more and more problematic as the web grows. In addition, search tools usually present to the user only a list of search results, failing to provide further personalized analysis which could help users identify useful information and comprehend these results. To alleviate these problems, we propose a client-based architecture that incorporates noun phrasing and self-organizing map techniques. Two systems, namely CI Spider and Meta Spider, have been built based on this architecture. User evaluation studies have been conducted and the findings suggest that the proposed architecture can effectively facilitate web search and analysis.

We present the design of a visualization tool that graphically displays the strength of query concepts in the retrieved documents. Graphically displaying document surrogate information enables set-at-a-time perusal of documents, rather than document-at-a-time perusal of textual displays. By prvialing additional relevance information about the retrieved documents, the tool aids the user in accurately identifying relevant documents. Results of an experiment evaluating the tool shows that when users have the tool they are able to identify relevant documents in a shorter period of time than without the tool, and with increased accuracy. We have evidence to believe that appropriately designed graphical displays can enable users to better interact with the system. 1

this paper, we describe in details such an evaluation framework developed to study the effectiveness of MetaSpider, and report initial findings of a user study guided by this metric. The article starts with a brief review of related fields. Section 2.1 discusses using meta-search engines to increase precision. Section 2.2 presents different clustering paradigms and existing post-retrieval document clustering visualization techniques. Section 2.3 brings in an important dimension of IR, the evaluation of IR systems. In section 3, the architectural design and major components of MetaSpider are illustrated. Section 4 discusses the evaluation framework of the user study, and section 5 reports and discusses the findings of the user experiments. Finally, in section 6, we summarize our research contributions and discuss future work

We are interested in questions of improving user control in bestmatch text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple visualizations that nonetheless go beyond the minimal ones generally available can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help users decide---given a set of documents retrieved by a query---which documents and passages are worth closer examination. We built a document viewer incorporating a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is helpful to non-expert searchers. Participants' reaction to the visualization was very positive, while the objective results were inconclusive. Keywords Digital libraries, systems, information retrieval, user interface, GUI, user study, visualization, scrollbar. 1.

This article presents two studies concerning the role of individual differences in searching through a spatialsemantic virtual environment. In the first study, 10 subjects searched for two topics through a spatial user interface of a semantic space. A strong positive correlation was found between associative memory (MA-1) and search performance (r # 0.855, p # 0.003), but no significant correlation was found between visual memory (MV-1) and search performance. In the second study, 12 subjects participated in a within-subject experimental design. The same spatial user interface and a simple textual user interface were used. The effects of spatial ability (VZ-2), associative memory (MA-1), and on-line experience were tested on a set of interrelated search performance scores. A statistically significant main effect of on-line experience was found, F(6, 4) # 6.213, p # 0.049, two-tailed. In particular, on-line experience has a significant effect on the recall scores with the textual interface. Individuals experienced in on-line search are more likely to have a higher recall score with the textual interface than less experienced individuals. No significant main effects were found for spatial ability and associative memory. Subjects' comments suggest a potentially complex interplay between individuals' mental models and the high-dimensional semantic model. Qualitative and process-oriented studies are, therefore, called for to reveal the complex interaction between individuals' cognitive abilities, domain knowledge, and direct manipulation skills. A recommendation is made that spatial-semantic models should be adaptable to suit individuals and tasks at various levels

This paper introduces a graphical method for visually presenting and exploring the results of multiple queries simultaneously. This method allows a user to visually compare multiple query result sets, explore various combinations among the query result sets, and identify the “best ” matches for combinations of multiple independent queries. This approach might also help users explore methods for progressively improving queries by visually comparing the improvement in result sets. 1.

Most existing Web search tools work only with individual users and do not help a user benefit from previous search experiences of others. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Spider, a multi-agent system designed to provide post-retrieval analysis and enable across-user collaboration in Web search and mining. This system allows the user to annotate search sessions and share them with other users. We also report a user study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of this system. Our experimental findings show that subjects' search performance was degraded, compared to individual search scenarios in which users had no access to previous searches, when they had access to a limited number (e.g., 1 or 2) of earlier search sessions done by other users. However, search performance improved significantly when subjects had access to more search sessions. This indicates that gain from collaboration through collaborative Web searching and analysis does not outweigh the overhead of browsing and comprehending other users' past searches until a certain number of shared sessions have been reached. In this paper, we also catalog and analyze several different types of user collaboration behavior observed in the context of Web mining. D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.