Towards Cognitive Optimisation of a Search Engine Interface
Kenneth Treharne, Darius Pfitzner, David M W Powers · 2006
Search engine interfaces come in a range of variations from the familiar text-based approach to the more experimental graphical systems. It is rare however that psychological or human factors research is undertaken to properly evaluate or optimize the systems, and to the extent this has been done the results have tended to contradict some of the assumptions that have driven search engine design. Our research is focussed on a model in which at least 100 hits are selected from a corpus of documents based on a set of query words and displayed graphically. Matrix manipulation techniques in the SVD/LSA family are used to identify significant dimensions and display documents according to a subset of these dimensions. The research questions we are investigating in this context relate to the computational methods (how to rescale the data), the linguistic information (how to characterize a document), and the visual attributes (which linguistic dimensions to display using which attributes).