TugOfWar: a simple 2D web visualization technique
Essam A. El-Kwae, Li-Shiang Tsay · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
As the World Wide Web (WWW) continues to grow at an enormous rate, finding useful information on the WWW is becoming more and more tedious and time consuming. This paper introduces a new visualization technique called TugOfWar for the visualization of search results on the WWW. TugOfWar provides a simple, 2-Dimensional (2D), and interactive graphical user interface to help the users comprehend and filter such results. The TugOfWar interface visually displays the relationship between the query keywords and the displayed documents (inter-document relationships) and the relevance of the query keywords to each individual document (intra-document relationships). Operations on the interface such as zoom in/out, add/remove keywords, or display details of a document increase the power of visualization. A large number of documents may be displayed on one screen, which allows users to judge document relevance more quickly and accurately rather than by linearly flipping through result pages. The TugOfWar technique is intended to provide a global overview of the search results and may be combined with other visualization techniques to provide more details about the contents of a specific document. Several examples are used to illustrate the advantages of the TugOfWar approach.