Exploiting Browsing History for Supporting Exploratory Search

• Main Authors: Wei-Lin Chen, 陳緯霖
• Other Authors: Wei-Guang Teng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/29962555227366953296

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工程科學系碩博士班 === 97 === With the advance of information technologies, web search has become a necessary activity for most Internet users. Although current search engines are powerful enough to respond required search results in seconds, information seekers may still feel arduous to digest them when conducting the exploratory search. In other words, when users are unfamiliar with the domain of their goals or unsure about the ways to achieve their goals, they may need to read numerous pages before fully understand what they are searching for. Note that it is more feasible for users if their browsed information can be properly analyzed and organized. In this work, we thus propose to fully exploit the browsing history to help users clarify their thoughts and discover new insights during the process of exploratory search. Specifically, interactive user interfaces of two different modes, i.e., the timeline mode and the relevance mode, are devised to provide users a vivid impression of their browsing history. In the timeline mode, the temporal granularities are adjusted according to the timestamps of search sessions. This helps users to perceive the time distance among sessions in a much easier way. Moreover, in the relevance mode, the search sessions are displayed on a diagram which is like a guide map for users to clearly identify the relationships. Empirical studies on a prototype system show that our approach is feasible for users to retrospect their browsing history so as to obtain more valuable knowledge.