Exploring Web Search Results Using Coordinated Views

Most web search engines use a list-based representation of web search results, promoting a sequential evaluation of the document surrogates. Commonly, these search engines only display ten document surrogates per page, limiting the users’ ability to explore the search results. We have developed two systems to support the visual exploration of web search results: HotMap and Concept Highlighter. In both of these systems, the search results are provided at two levels of detail: an overview map that provides a compact and abstract representation of the top 100 documents returned by the underlying search engine; and a detail window that shows 20 to 25 documents at a time. In this paper, we will discuss how these coordinated views support the visual exploration of web search results.