Meaning metaphor for visualizing search results

While searching the Web, the user is often confronted by a great number of results, generally sorted by their rank. These results are then displayed as a succession of ordered lists. Facing the limits of this approach, we propose a prototype to explore new organizations and presentations of search results, as well as new types of interactions with the results in order to make their exploration more intuitive and efficient. The main topic of this paper is the processing of the results coming from an information retrieval system. Although the relevance depends on the result quality, the effectiveness of the result processing represents an alternative way to improve the relevance for the user. Given the current expectations, this processing is composed by an organization step and a visualization step. Then the proposed prototype organizes the results according to their meaning using a Kohonen self-organizing map, and also visualizes them in a 3D scene to increase the representation space. The 3D metaphor proposed here is a city.