Organizing search results with categorized overviews, based on meaningful and stable categories, can support user exploration, understanding, and discovery. This can be particularly helpful for exploratory search tasks, such as searching the literature of an unfamiliar field, when information needs are imprecise or evolving, or when searchers are unfamiliar with terms and concepts of the search domain. In these situations, ranked or sorted lists alone are insufficient.
This talk reports results of our studies that used thematic categories and a US government hierarchy to organize web search results. The studies suggest positive benefits from the use of compact overviews, tightly coupled with ranked result lists. I'll also share principles that we are developing for the design of practical search result visualizations, and describe the SERVICE meta-search engine, which was developed to support these studies.
Bill has been designing and implementing software systems for 19 years. His consulting practice, Takoma Software, Inc., provides design, prototyping, and evaluation services for information systems and their user interfaces. He also teaches HCI and programming courses, and is a Lecturer in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.
Bill's dissertation research investigates the use of categorized overviews based on meaningful and stable categories to support exploratory search. He will complete his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland in Spring, 2006.
This talk is part of the CLIP Colloquium Series, organized by Jimmy Lin (jimmylin -at- umd .dot. edu). For the complete schedule, please visit http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/CLIP/colloq/.