Visualizing Data Sets

Searching the web Searching information on the web is becoming a daily activity for many. The web is growing at a phenomenal rate; some sources say there are currently over 2.5 billion pages available and this number is increasing by 7.3 million pages per day [1,2]. Despite this complexity current search engines do an amazing job. However, search results are mostly presented in rank-ordered lists that the user browses to find interesting information. These traditional representations are spread over multiple pages and the user only views a small proportion of the results in a single window. Certainly the search engines attempt to display the most relevant information in the top 10 ranks but experience shows that we still scroll through many results and load multiple pages. Textual and Graphical depiction These text presentations take up a vast amount of the screen real estate. Graphical representations, on the other hand, can display much more information in a smaller space. Perhaps hundreds or even thousands of results could be (abstractly) displayed in the same area as 10 text results. Such abstract depic-tions would provide a holistic view of the information that the user could refine or zoom into to gather more details from the realization [3]. These graphical representations could provide the user with a synoptic view of many search results (without the need for paging or scrolling), allow clustering operations (portraying similarities between search results), allow the user to quickly find relevant information and then drill-down into specific details. Moreover, such graphical representations could display information-rich content including information/statis-tics about the sites and pages that the URLs actually address. Conversely, users may expect a textual form as they are used to browsing and manipulating the search results through these interfaces. In essence, both representation methods (textual and graphi-cal) are valid and have their benefits. Thus, we believe it is useful to simultaneously present the search result information in both textual and graphical forms. Indeed, by coordinating each view together the user would be able to more quickly drill-down to the pages that are most interesting and useful. Multiple views of search-results We have developed some visualization tools that display the search result data in multiple linked views, where each window provides a dedicated view on the search results. In this paper, which is a summary of the work given in [4]. We present one system that displays the traditional rank-ordered list …