Visualizing social links in exploratory search

  • Authors:

  • Justin J. Donaldson;Michael Conover;Benjamin Markines;Heather Roinestad;Filippo Menczer

  • Affiliations:

  • Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA and Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Torino, Italy;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA and Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Torino, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The visualization of results is a critical component in search engines, and the standard ranked list interface has been a consistently predominant model. The emergence of social media provides a new opportunity to investigate visualization techniques that expose socially derived links between objects to support their exploration. Here we introduce and evaluate network-based visualizations for facilitating the exploration of a Web knowledge space. We developed a force directed network interface to visualize the result sets provided by GiveALink.org, a social bookmarking site. The classifications and tags by users are aggregated to build a social similarity network between bookmarked resources. We administered a user study to evaluate the potential of leveraging such social links in an exploratory search task. During exploration, the similarity links are used to arrange the resources in a semantic layout. Users in our study prefer a hybrid interface combining a conventional ranked list and a two dimensional network map, allowing them to find the same amount of relevant information using fewer queries. This behavior is a direct result of the additional structural information present in the network visualization, which aids them in the exploration of the information space.