Case study: fishing for information on the Internet

As the Internet continues to grow, the amount of accessible information becomes increasingly vast. Search tools exist that allow users to find relevant information. However, a search can often produce such a large amount of data that it becomes hard to ferret out the most appropriate and highest quality information. In addition, some search tools lose valuable information when displaying the results to the user. The paper describes a search visualization tool, called FISH, for viewing hierarchically structured information and managing information overload. FISH (Forager for the Information Super Highway) allows users to visualize the results of search requests across large document spaces in a way that preserves the structure of the information space. FISH displays the returned documents as rectangles, using a combination of order, indentation, size, and color to denote document hierarchy, the score of the documents with respect to the search, and other data attributes. In addition, the user can navigate through the document space for in-depth probing and refinement.