Directions in Web Search Interfaces: Enhancing Visualization and Interaction

to Support Exploratory Search

Bill Kules2010 SLIS Symposium - Bridging the Spectrum

January 29, 2010

Outline

• What is exploratory search?

• Layered model of search

• Examples

• Impact and trends

Exploratory Search

• Motivated by complex information problems

• Often involves uncertainty, ambiguity, discovery, learning

• May be exhaustive

• May extend over hours, days, months

(Marchionini 2006; White 2009; White, Kules, et al. 2006)

Layered model of search

(Järvelin and Ingwersen, 2004)

Examples

• Faceted search

• Social techniques

• Visualization techniques

Faceted Search

• National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations - http://thumper.vtls.com:6080/visualizer/

• Relation Browser - http://ils.unc.edu/relationbrowser/

• mSpace - http://mspace.fm/

Relation Browser

mSpace

Social Techniques

• Mr Taggy - http://mrtaggy.com/

Visualization

• AquaBrowser - http://discovery.wrlc.org/cu • Treemap

-http://www.hivegroup.com/gallery/digg.html • Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates -

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nvss/ • Continuum timeline browser -

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13818/2/uist2007-continuum.mov

Treemap – Digg’s most popular stories

NVSS

Shneiderman & Aris, 2006

Continuum Timeline Browser

Impact and Trends

• Simplicity is on the wane

• More combinations – lists + visualization

• Rich interactions are becoming the norm

• Beyond the query/response– Overviews, histories, domain-specific support

Acknowledgements

From Keyword Search to Exploration: Designing Future Search Interfaces for the Web

Max L. Wilson, Bill Kules, m. c. schraefel and Ben Shneiderman

Foundations and Trends in Web Science

Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010) 1–96