Intelligent User Interface for a Web Search Engineby Organizing Page Information AgentsSeiji Yamada

Fumihiko Murase

CISS, IGSSE, Tokyo Institute of Technology
4259 Nagatsuta, Midori, Yokohama 226-8502, JAPANyamada@ymd.dis.titech.ac.jp

Abstract

This paper describes an organization method of page information agents for adaptive interface between a user and aWeb search engine. Though a Web search engine indicates a
hit list of relevant Web pages, it includes many useless ones.
Thus a user often needs to select useful Web pages fromthem with page information like the title, the URL on the hit
list, and actually fetch the Web pages for checking relevance.
Since the page information is neither sufficient nor necessary
for a user, adequate information is necessary for valid selection. Hence we propose adaptive interface AOAI in which
different page information agents are organized through human evaluation.
INTRODUCTION

A Web search engine provides a list of matched Web pages(hit list) to queries from a user. Unfortunately it tends to indicate many irrelevant Web pages in a hit list. Hence a userneeds to select useful pages from a hit list using page information indicated on each page in a hit list, and fetch theWeb pages to investigate relevance. Since the informationon the hit Web pages like a title, the size and head sentencesof a Web page is fixed and neither sufficient nor necessary,a user needs adequate information for correct and quick selection. Thus we propose adaptive interface in which different page information agents are organized through humancomputer interaction and suitable interface is gradually constructed. We call this framework AOAI (Agent Organizationbased Adaptive Interface).
OVERVIEW OF AOAIAOAI[1] is adaptive interface between a Web search engine
and a user like shown in Fig.1. AOAI receives queries froma user and gives it to a search engine as it is. Then it obtains
the hit list to the queries from a search engine and indicatesthem to a user with useful information for selecting a page
which he/she wants. The page information is indicated byeach PIA (Page Information Agent) like Fig.2.
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QueryQuery
SearchengineUser
Hit listwith off-line
information

Hit listwith adequate
page information.

On-line information
The WWW

Figure 1: Overview of AOAI.
The following shows a main procedure of AOAI. Additionally to the following procedure, a user is able to deconstruct
an integrated PIA by drag&drop it on the factory icon ((B) inFig.2).
1. Give a query to AOAI.
2. A hit list to the query is indicated for a user. Fig.2 shows
an initial window. When a user points a target page number ((A) in Fig.2) about which he/she wants the page information by a mouse cursor, all the PIAs indicate page
information on the page.
3. Select the Web page which he/she wants with page information from PIAs.
4. Double click the target page number and see it through aWeb browser.
5. If the page is what a user wants, he/she evaluates PIAs
whose information contributed to user’s selection, and organization is done. The positive/negative evaluation is doneby clicking a right/center button of a mouse on a PIA.
Otherwise, go to 3 and a user selects other pages. Alsofor seeing page information effectively, a user can directly
arrange PIA by drag and drop it anytime.
6. This query is finish by pushing “Exit” button ((D) in Fig.2), and if necessary, AOAI organizes PIAs using the procedure described later. Go to 1 with the next query.
ORGANIZING PIAs

AOAI provides twelve PIAs indicating URL, traffic, title,
head and so on. An agent has human-like appearance which

(A)

(C)

(D)
(B)

Figure 2: Interface window (initial state).

Figure 4: Some agents are integrated.

Growing

Mini-baby

Baby

ChildAdult, organ

EmbededFigure 3: Growing character for each stage.
changes depending on the growth value, and a balloon inwhich page information is indicated.
A PIA Ai has the following properties on organization anditself activity.
• Growth G i : This property indicates A i ’s activity of whichis increased and decreased by human evaluation.
• Stage Si : This takes seven values indicating A i ’s stage:trash, mini-baby, baby, child, adult, organ and embedded
depending on the growth G i like Fig.3.
• Page information I i : This is a list of page information
which Ai indicates.
• Position P i (x, y): Position (x, y) of an agent A i .
The growth Gi is updated by a user’s click for evaluation. We
define some threshold for controlling the growth of interfaceagents. In addition to integration, AOAI provides a way toeliminate useless agents.
The relation between two adult agents is activated when thetwo organ agents are closed within a threshold. We use undirected graph representation for organizing PIAs. The nodes
and arcs correspond to agents and activated relations. In thegraph, groups of PIAs to be integrated are determined by investigating maximal connected sub-graphs.
EXECUTED EXAMPLES

We have been fully implemented AOAI using JAVA. Fig.2,Fig.4 and Fig.5 show the executed examples of AOAI with aquery “AI Interface Agent”. Fig.2 stands for an initial AOAI
having all of the 12 PIAs. As the agents get user’s evalua-Figure 5: A hit list in which agents are embedded.
tion, they grew and were organized like Fig.4. Finally thesingle PIA made of Title, Traffic and Head agents survived
and was embedded into a hit list like Fig.5. Also by making
experiments with subjects, we found AOAI was a promising
approach for providing adequate page information in a hitlist.
CONCLUSION

We proposed AOAI: adaptive interface in which different page
information agents are organized through human evaluation.
In AOAI, the PIAs indicating different information in a hit
list like file-size, network traffic and a page title are preparedat first. A user evaluates them through usage of a search engine, and they are organized. As results, different organization is achieved depending on a user and a task.
REFERENCES

1. S. Yamada and F. Murase. Adaptive user interface ofa Web search engine by organizing page information
agents. In WebNet 2000, pages 586–591, 2000.