Visualizing Search Results as Web Conversations
Shreeharsh Kelkar, Ajita John, Dorée Duncan Seligmann · 2009
The user experience on the World Wide Web has radically changed in recent years into a participatory model. Users can now attach comments, tags, bookmarks, ratings to different kinds of web content such as news articles, blog-posts, online videos, etc. Thus conversations, both implicit and explicit, develop around web content providing valuable context for web search results. This paper advocates a conversational approach to visualizing web search results where each link resulting from a web search is considered the central artifact of a web conversation. Using websites like del.icio.us and Digg, this artifact is augmented with tags, comments, ratings along with the people who provided them. We have developed a system where search results from Google Search are visualized as a social network of web conversations. The visualization allows a user to see the rich inter-linking between tags, links and people, and the conversational relevance of each search result, thereby facilitating exploratory search. Currently, our system augments web search results from Google with meta-data (i.e. people, tags, notes) from del.icio.us. Categories and Subject Descriptors