Towards Visual Web Search: Interactive Query Formulation and Search Result Visualization
Carey L. Williamson, Sheelagh Carpendale · 2009
Search on today’s Web is influenced by the early Web that was primarily text-based: search parameters are typically entered as text queries and the resulting resources are mostly displayed as textual lists. To gain an overview of the information space and the retrieved resources, the information seeker has to issue several search queries and skim many search results. In this paper we show how visualization widgets (VisGets) are a viable way to query and visualize multiple types of Web data. We have applied VisGets to three prominent resource types on the Web—hypertext, syndicated content, and Semantic Web data—and discuss the limitations of the VisGets prototype and the challenges of this approach.