PEx-WEB: Content-based Visualization of Web Search Results

The efficacy of search engines has expanded the uses for the information available on the Web. An increasing number of applications make use of the WWW as a primary source of information. The usefulness of such applications is, however, impaired by the current styles of display of the Web search results. This paper presents a system that adapts two techniques to map and explore Web results visually in order to find relevant patterns and relationships amongst the resulting documents. The first technique creates a visual map of the search results using a content-based multidimensional projection. The second techniques is capable of identifying, labeling and displaying topics within sub-groups of documents on the map. The system (The Projection explorer for the WWW, or PEx-Web) implements these techniques and various additional tools as means to make better use of Web search results for exploratory applications.