ENHANCING USER EFFECTIVENESS WHEN SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION ON THE WEB
Kemal Efe
Center for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Louisiana
ABSTRACT
In existing search engines, the only controls provided to users are a textbox and a search button.
Once a list of search results is displayed, a user is given limited ability to explore the information
space further. This paper focuses on mechanisms that allow web users to search for information in a
systematic method. Components of the system in this paper include (a) Methods of display to enhance
the presentation of search results, (b) A set of navigation controls for users to explore other web
pages in the graph neighborhood of those pages presented in a search results list, and (c) Additional
navigation controls for users to retrieve a list of pages in the graph neighborhood of the currently
displayed web page in the web browser. Considered together, the set of mechanisms presented here makes
up a user interface responsive to the “topic narrowing procedure” that people often use when searching
for information.
KEYWORDS: Search Engine Interfaces, Navigation Controls, search engines, web search, information retrieval.
Presented at the HCI International 2005, 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
(Click HERE to see the paper)(Click HERE to see the presentation)