Desktop search engine visualisation and evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Schubert Foo;Douglas Hendry

  • Affiliations:

  • Division of Information Studies, School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore;Division of Information Studies, School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • ICADL'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Asian digital libraries: looking back 10 years and forging new frontiers
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

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.