A Visual Interface Design for Search Results from Multiple Search Engines

Abstract

Because of the explosively growing amount of information on the World Wide Web, it is a time-consuming task to find the demanded information. Although many search engines exist to help users search for the information, most of them reveal limited information, because they show the search results in list-based interfaces, and users need to check each entry to have a clear view of the search results. In this paper, a visual interface is proposed to display the search results collected from multiple back-end search engines and to help users discover important information. A prototype has been implemented, and it visualizes the search results from six popular search engines. Two kinds of information are further visualized: hyperlink reference relationships and whether some pages are of a same site. In the aspect of information exhibition, the visual interface can help users reduce the time of seeking the relevant results. It can be applied to help users search for information efficiently