Zooming in one dimension can be better than two: an interface for placing search results in context with a restricted sitemap

The visualisation of large hierarchies without losing context is a difficult problem. Many interfaces have been developed for this, and many of these use zooming, which is sometimes combined with a distortion view method such as a fisheye lense. Most of these interfaces use and zoom in two dimensions, while others use and zoom in three dimensions. We present a 2D interface realised in the SGviewer tool which zooms in only one dimension. The other dimension is used to convey subtree depth. To demonstrate our interface, we apply it to the problem of presenting search results. The delivery of search results either for a large site, or for a local file system is often difficult. Often the number of matching pages or files is high. A typical approach to this, is to weight the relevance of the matches. An alternative approach which can complement the former is to present the results in some context, clustering the results at the same time. We show how our interface can be used to present search results classified with a restricted sitemap