An Interactive Information Seeking Interface for Exploratory Search

Abstract

As the Web has become a commodity, it is used for a variety of purposes and tasks that may require a great deal of cognitive efforts. However, most search engines developed for the Web provide users with only searching and browsing capabilities, leaving all the burdens of manipulating information objects to the users. In this thesis, we focus on an exploratory search task and propose an underlying framework for human-Web interactions. Based on the framework, we designed and implemented a new information seeking interface that helps users reduce cognitive burden. The new human-Web interface provides a personal workspace that can be created and manipulated cooperatively with the system, which helps the user conceptualize his information seeking tasks and record their trails for future uses. This interaction tool has been tested for its efficacy as an aid for exploratory search.

A study of visually linked keywords to support exploratory browsing in academic search

“…Many techniques for information organization and information re-finding have been proposed in the context of performing exploratory web search (Capra et al, 2010). Recently, workspaces have been used to organize important information separate from the SERP, storing relevant keywords (Peltonen, Belorustceva, et al, 2017) and annotations (Nedumov et al, 2019), tracking previous interactions such as queries and relations between the browsed pages (Park et al, 2008), and enabling crosssession search (Jhaveri & Räihä, 2005;Li et al, 2020).…”

“…Workspaces have long been studied as a mechanism to support exploratory searchers to collect relevant artefacts (Furnas & Rauch, 1998;Shah & González-Ibáñez, 2010). While they are becoming increasingly common within academic digital library search interfaces (Jhaveri & Räihä, 2005;Li et al, 2020;Nedumov et al, 2019;Park et al, 2008;…”