Query Transformation by Visualizing and Utilizing Information about What Users Are or Are Not Searching

摘要

The usage of search engines to obtain necessary information from the WWW has become popular. It is hard for users to make proper queries when they want to retrieve ambiguous information or topics that they are not familiar with. In this paper, we propose a system that helps users to retrieve information by visualizing efficient keywords. The system extracts important terms from search results and plots them on a two-dimensional graph, and the user can look down upon the tendency of search results. The system enables the user to re-rank and re-search search results dynamically by moving terms displayed on the graph. In addition, we attempt to extend the searching area by presenting complementary information related to the query. We verified the usefulness of our method by applying it to a web page search and a digital library.