Augmenting the visual presentation of Web search results

Improving the relevancy of Web search results has been of increasing interest in recent years. The nature of the Web implies heterogeneity, large volumes, and varied structures. Hence, finding results that best suit the needs of every individual is a very challenging problem. Accordingly, interactive graphical and visualization techniques are suggested to increase the ability of the display to handle large numbers of results while simultaneously presenting several attributes for each Web page. In addition, query reformulation and reconstruction is usually controlled by the search engine. Consequently, the results suffer from redundancy and/or irrelevancy. Integrating the user in the process of query reformulation - by visualizing the process itself - may benefit the overall search relevance. This paper presents an interactive Visual Search Engine (the VSE) in which both processes of query reformulation and results presentation are visualized. In the user study, the effectiveness of the VSE was demonstrated when compared to Google.