Effective Organization and Visualization of Web Search Results

ISBN 0-88986-564-7While searching the web, the user is often confronted by a great number of results, generally displayed in a list which is sorted according to the relevance of the results. Facing the limits of this approach, we propose to explore new organizations and presentations of search results, as well as new types of interactions with the results 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 results quality, the effectiveness of the results 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 approach organizes the results according to their meaning using a Kohonen Self- OrganizingMap (SOM), and visualizes them in a 3D scene to increase the representation space. The 3D metaphor proposed here is a city