“`Andreas, Rauber´? Conference pages are over there, German documents on the lower left...”: an “old-fashioned” approach to Web search results visualization

With the massive advance of electronic document repositories, usable interfaces to these repositories gain importance. While sophisticated information retrieval techniques provide acceptable result selection, interaction with a repository as such and with the documents retrieved leaves a lot to be desired, as users commonly are restricted to reading through one-dimensionally sorted lists of document descriptions. The authors present the combination of a topical organization of documents via the SOMLib system with the intuitive representation of document metadata provided by the libViewer visualization. It allows users to approach query results in a way comparable to how conventional libraries are being used. We demonstrate the benefits of this system by using it as a front-end to the AltaVista search engine