The Time Has Come for Visual Search

摘要

Visual search, the ability to review results graphically, has been on the horizon for quite some time. Industry prophets, those who stay awake until 2 or 3 a.m. exploring the most esoteric Web sites, have been pointing to graphical results as a likely method for improving users' ability to review search results in a more meaningful way. What initially caught the attention of the working searcher community, however, was the joint venture between Groxis and Yahoo! offering visual search, for free, to anyone who wished to try it. Judy Luther, Maureen Kelly, and Donald Beagle pointed out in "Visualize This" (Library Journal, March 1, 2005) that visualization tools combine concept clustering with the ability to get "a 'picture' of the meaning behind the words." Users can quickly discover aspects or emphasis or content types that lead to more meaningful searches.