Improving the Effectiveness of WEB Search Engines Using Selectable Views of Retrieval Results

Abstract

Perusal of textual displays of document surrogates produced by Web-based ranked-output retrieval services may require much user time, effort, and money. In this paper we present VIEWER, a graphical interface that allows visualization and manipulation of views of retrieval results, where a view is the subset of retrieved surrogates that contain a specified subset of query terms. We argue that VIEWER helps the user focus on relevant parts of the results and, in addition, it may facilitate query reformulation. We present the results of an experiment performed by six subjects on two medium size bibliographical test collections in which VIEWER, used as an interactive ranking systems, outperformed both best match ranking and coordinatio