A new visual search interface for web browsing

Songhua Xu, Tao Jin, Francis C.M. Lau

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

We introduce a new visual search interface for search engines. The interface is a user-friendly and informative graphical front-end for organizing and presenting search results in the form of topic groups. Such a semantics-oriented search result presentation is in contrast with conventional search interfaces which present search results according to the physical structures of the information. Given a user query, our interface first retrieves relevant online materials via a third-party search engine. And then we analyze the semantics of search results to detect latent topics in the result set. Once the topics are detected, we map the search result pages into topic clusters. According to the topic clustering result, we divide the available screen space for our visual interface into multiple topic displaying regions, one for each topic. For each topic's displaying region, we summarize the information contained in the search results under the corresponding topic so that only key messages will be displayed. With this new visual search interface, users are conveyed the key information in the search results expediently. With the key information, users can navigate to the final, desired results with less effort and time than conventional searching. Supplementary materials for this paper are available at http://www.cs.hku.hk/~songhua/visualsearch/.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM'09
Pages152-161
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM'09 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Feb 9 2009Feb 12 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM'09

Other

Other2nd ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM'09
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period2/9/092/12/09

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

Keywords

  • Document summarization
  • Online browsing and navigation
  • Visual search interface
  • Web search

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