Colored-sketch of Text Information

Introduction The development of the Internet and digital systems has allowed people unimpeded access to a massive collection of digital information. However, the explosive rate of growth in recent years and the complexity of the information have made it difficult to pinpoint desired information. The conventional search supporting tools, where the users still heavily depend on reading, are not an optimal approach in exploring huge volumes of information. Development of effective solutions in finding relevant information from such a large compilation of data is an important task and is in high demand. In response to the request, researchers have developed methods that present information through visual abstraction. Information visualization has proven to be an effective technique for the navigation of huge information spaces where the users swiftly acquire insight into information with their cognitive activities (Card, Mackinlay, & Shneiderman, 1999). Some document visualization methods have concentrated on presenting sets of outstanding topics of huge corpora through intuitive visual representation (Wise, Thomas, Pennock, Lantrip, Pottier, Schur, & Crow, 1995). Other visualization systems allow users to investigate overall structure and detail information concurrently (Lamping, Rao, & Pirolli, 1995). However, the existing systems are expecting further improvements in delivering distributional behavior of queries and presenting multiple articles on a limited screen space for comparison. This study has developed a system called Query Fingerprinting (QF) that informs the frequency of queries, distributional information about the queries, and the segmental structures of the document simultaneously. By visualizing a lengthy document into a sequence of icons, this compact, but informative abstraction allows users to compare multiple search results intuitively and swiftly while minimizing the need to reference the underlying contents. Applying this paradigm to other business models--Internet and Digital Library systems that demand more effective informing solutions--will contribute for the improvement of search efficiency in those environments. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed technique as a search-supporting tool, an experimental study has been conducted to compare the efficiency of the QF system over a conventional summary-based (SB) system. The experimental results showed that the users who employed the QF system showed far better performance, while maintaining the accuracy, in finding relevant information than those who utilized the SB retrieval system. In the post-experimental survey, users show a high degree of satisfaction using the QF system. Related Work Development of techniques for the presentation of search results in a simple yet instructive configuration has been an important and challenging research area. With the recent rapid growth of information, the effectiveness of the search-supporting tool is of major importance in search efficiency. Numerous approaches have been developed to support users' search activities that can be classified into two groups, summarization and visualization. This paper proposes a method that presents information through visual representations, thus focus is on reviewing previous literature pertaining to visualization. The rank-based text retrieval system is one of the conventional methodologies used to present retrieved information to users. These systems frequently display a list of titles of retrieved information in order of document relevancy where documents are ranked based on the overall similarity of the document or keywords to a given query set (Cooper, Gey, & Dabney, 1992; Fuhr & Muller, 1987). The rank-based information retrieval (IR) system commonly presents the order of articles with unknown algorithms that do not reflect users' preferences. One of the most common IR systems shows summaries of relevant documents as a search result. …