Linking Related Content in Web Encyclopedias With Search Query TAG Clouds
Christoph Trattner · 2011
In this paper we present a novel tool for exploring related resources in Web encyclopedias called QueryCloud. Typically, users come to an encyclopedia from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing and upon reading the first page on the site they leave it immediately thereafter. To tackle this problem in other systems such as Web shops, additional browsing tools for easy finding of related content are provided. In order to overcome this issue in the context of Web encyclopedia systems, we introduce a tool called QueryCloud. The tool combines two promising approaches – tag clouds and historic search queries – into a new single one, i.e. each document in the system is enriched with a tag cloud containing collections of related concepts populated from historic search queries. To test the feasibility of the approach, we integrated a prototypical implementation of the tool into a large Web encyclopedia called the Austria-Forum and conducted several experiments on a theoretical and empirical level. As our experiments show, QueryCloud provides a great alternative to traditional forms of tag cloud creation. With several experiments on a theoretical and empirical level we show that tag clouds generated by our system outperform tag clouds that are based on user-tags in terms of linking content and navigability. This work is relevant for researchers interested in the navigability of emergent hypertext structures and for engineers seeking to improve the navigability of large information systems, such as Web encyclopedias.