A new visual search interface for web browsing

Abstract

We introduce a new visual search interface for search engines. The interface is a user-friendly and informative graphical front-end for organizing and presenting search results in the form of topic groups. Such a semantics-oriented search result presentation is in contrast with conventional search interfaces which present search results according to the physical structures of the information. Given a user query, our interface first retrieves relevant online materials via a third-party search engine. And then we analyze the semantics of search results to detect latent topics in the result set. Once the topics are detected, we map the search result pages into topic clusters. According to the topic clustering result, we divide the available screen space for our visual interface into multiple topic displaying regions, one for each topic. For each topic's displaying region, we summarize the information contained in the search results under the corresponding topic so that only key messages will be displayed. With this new visual search interface, users are conveyed the key information in the search results expediently. With the key information, users can navigate to the final, desired results with less effort and time than conventional searching. Supplementary materials for this paper are available at http://www.cs.hku.hk/~songhua/visualsearch/. Copyright 2009 ACM.