A visual technique to indicate overall and component relevancy of search-engine results

The paper presents a tool for visualising search engine results: the R-Wheel. Four experiments are described. The first experiment looks at whether users can differentiate the importance of terms in a multi-term query. The second considers the use of the R-Wheel in recognising overall relevance. The third looks at the ability of users to use the R-Wheel to determine the most relevant results to a multi-term query. The fourth experiment compares the R-Wheel to traditional representations and asks users which representation they found the easiest to interpret. The paper concludes that users interpret the R-Wheel representation more correctly than others, and that users prefer the R-Wheel to other representations