Inside-In Search: An Alternative for Performing Ancillary Search Tasks on the Web

Some of the search tasks users perform on the Web aim at complementing the information they are currently reading in a Web page: they are ancillary search tasks. Currently, the standard way to support such ancillary searches follows an inside-out approach, which means that query results are shown in a new window/tab or as a replacement of the current page. We claim that such inside-out approach is only suitable if users really want to dissociate the search results from the Web page they were reading. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, called "inside-in", where query results are displayed inside the Web page next to the keyword that motivated the user to launch an ancillary search. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we have developed a tool that embeds an egocentric information visualization technique in the Web page. This tool supports nested queries and allows the display of multiple data attributes. The approach is illustrated by a case study based on ancillary searches of co authors from a digital library. The paper also reports some preliminary results obtained with an experiment conducted with remote users.