evaluating the effectiveness of term frequency histograms for supporting interactive web search tasks
Throughout many of the different types of Web searches people perform, the primary tasks are to first craft a query that effectively captures their information needs, and then evaluate the search results seeking relevant documents. However, the top Web search engines generally provide little support for users in these tasks. WordBars is a next-generation Web search interface that provides an interactive histogram representation of the most frequently appearing terms within the titles and snippets of the top 100 search results. In this paper, the results of a user study are presented in which the ability of the participants to find relevant documents using the features of WordBars is measured. Most participants were able to find more relevant documents using WordBars when compared to the original order of the search results. Subjective reactions were very positive, with all the participants rating the interactive features of WordBars highly.
evaluation interaction web search search results exploration information filtering query refinement query formulation visualization