An Empirical Comparison of Visualization Tools to Assist Information Retrieval on the Web

Visualizations of subspaces on the World Wide Web can provide users the ability to identify relevant information from a set of Web pages, while gaining new insights or understanding of the space. This study tested three classes of visualization techniques, distortion, zoom, and expanding outline, to better understand which classes of visualization techniques may better represent the underlying structure. The effects of different visualization techniques on user performance on information searching tasks and the effects of different sizes of the Web spaces were studied. Eighty participants were asked to search information with and without a visualization tool over the large Web space. The factors that may have caused cognitive overloads are further discussed.