Supporting Informational Web Search with Interactive Explorations

As information technologies advance, the data amount gathered on the Internet increases at an incredible rapid speed. To ease the data overloading problem, people commonly use search engines to reach required information in seconds. Nevertheless, depending on different user goals in Web search, users occasionally get lost in the large number of search results when trying to explore them. In this paper, we propose an interactive scheme to support users to conduct such informational Web searches in the similar way of map explorations. Specifically, two main concepts, i.e., refocusing and refinement, are devised to constitute the interactive exploration processes. With a proper design and implementation, case studies utilizing our prototype system show that the proposed approach is feasible in improving usability of current search engines.