interpreting user answers is always open to
subjectivity, none of the previous researchers
validated their evaluation of user answers.
In both tests, users of the proposed interface
found significantly more number of the required
documents when they were given equal time.
Figures 8 and 9 show these results by using box-plot
graphs. As can be seen in Figure 8, the median value
of correct answers given by test subjects who used
the proposed interface is 8 while the mean value is 4
for the users that used the standard interface.
In the second test, the mean values were 10 (out
of 21 URLs) for the users of proposed interface and
6 for the users of traditional interface. The strong
agreement of outcomes in the two tests demonstrates
the validity of test procedures, and the outcome
strongly supports the original hypothesis of this
research.
Figure 10: Total number of queries entered box plot.
During the experiments, we logged the activities
of test subjects to record the number of queries they
tried. Figure 10 compares the number queries test
subjects tried during the first test. The outcome for
the second test was similar. Here the numbers on the
vertical column shows total number of queries tried
by a user for 10 search tasks. Even though they
found substantially more of the required pages, users
of the proposed interface tried substantially fewer
queries than users of the traditional interface. These
results imply that users were able to navigate to the
correct document even starting from a sub-optimal
initial search results list.
6 CONCLUSIONS
For any document of non-trivial content, there is
always a query that returns it among the top results,
but the query required to retrieve a document may
not be one that a user would think to use, at least
initially, if ever. The fact that users of our proposed
interface completed more successful searches while
writing fewer queries implies that future systems
designed along these ideas can be more satisfactory
for users.
REFERENCES
Chen, Y-F., Koutsofios, E. (1997). WebCiao: A Website
Visualization and Tracking System. Proceedings of
the World Conf. on the WWW and Internet
(WebNet97). Toronto Ontario, AACE, Norfolk, VA.
Cockburn, A., Greenberg, S., Mckenzie, B., Jasonsmith,
M., and Kaesten, S. (1999). WebView: A Graphical
Aid for Revisiting Web Pages. Proceedings of the
Australian Conference on Human Computer
Interaction, (OzCHI’99). Wagga Wagga, Australia,
November 28-30. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, 15-22.
Dean, J. and Henzinger, M. R. (May 1999). Finding
Related Pages in the World Wide Web. Computer
Networks, 31, 1467-1479.
Doemel, P. (1994). WebMap - A Graphical Hypertext
Navigation Tool. Proceedings of the 2nd International
World-Wide Web Conference (WWW ‘94). Chicago, IL,
USA. ELSEVIER Science, Toronto, Canada, 1994, 785-789.
Hasan, M., Mendelzon, A., and Vista, D. (1995). Visual
Web Surfing with Hy+. Proceedings of the 1995
Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on
Collaborative Research (CASCON'95). Toronto,
Ontario, Canada, November 7-9. IBM Press,
Lewisville, TX, 1995, 218-227.
Hightower, R. R., Ring, L., Helfman, J. I., Bederson, B.
B., Hollan, J. D. (1998). Graphical Multiscale Web
Histories: A Study of Padprints. Proceedings of the
9th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
(HYPERTEXT ‘98). Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 20-24.
ACM Press, New York, NY 58-65.
Kleinberg, J. (1999). Authoritative sources in a
Hyperlinked environment. Journal of the ACM, 46, 604-632.
Leouski, A., Allan, J. (2000). Improving Interactive
Retrieval by Combining Ranked List and Clustering.
Proceedings of Computer Assisted Information
Retrieval Conference (RIAO ’00). Paris, France, April
12-14. Springer Verlag, New York, NY, 2000, 665-681.
Maarek, Y., Jacovi, M., Shtalhaim, M., Ur, S., Zernik, D.,
and Shaul, I. B. (1997). WebCutter: A system for
dynamic and tailorable site mapping. Proceedings of
the 6th International World Wide Web Conference
(WWW ‘97). Santa Clara, CA, USA, April 7-11.
ELSEVIER Science, Toronto, Canada, 713-722.
Mukherjea, S., and Foley, J. D. (April 1995). Visualizing
the World-Wide Web with the Navigational
ViewBuilder. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems,
27, 1075-1087.
A USER INTERFACE FOR EXPLOITING WEB COMMUNITIES IN SEARCHING THE WEB
121