Coordinating Linear and 2D Displays to Support Exploratory Search

Linear and 2D displays have complementary strengths and this paper illustrates how they can be used in concert to support users in the search process. Linear lists are the dominant way for presenting search results and users are most familiar with such result displays. However, ranked lists can only display a limited number of results, whereas 2D layouts can display many results. This paper illustrates how several tightly coupled displays and controls can help users to explore large result sets. Further, it shows how linear and 2D displays can be combined to enable users to see structural relationships between the search results, such as being related to the same topics, tags or being stored on the same web host.