Desktop Search Engine Visualisation and Evaluation

Schubert Foo and Douglas Hendry

Abstract. This work investigates the potential of applying a suite of visualisation for query processing in a desktop search environment. While each of these visualizations may not be totally new on its own, we have attempted to add value to each one by endowing it with useful features, and to seamless integrate them to allow easy switching of views, thereby providing the novelty in this work to create a potentially useful means to process search results and carry out query refinements and exploration. These visualisations include a List View, Tree View, Map View, Bubble View, Tile View and Cloud View. A first evaluation was undertaken by 94 M.Sc. participants to gauge the system’s potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. The evaluation results were encouraging and showed that these views to be both effective and useful on the whole, and support the research premise that a combination of integrated visualisations will result in a more effective search tool.

Keywords: Query result processing, query reformulation, tree view, map view, bubble view, tile view, cloud view, evaluation, search engine, user interface

LNCS 4822, p. 372 ff.

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