Developing a Visual Interactive Search History Exploration System

MOTIVATION Visualizing search histories and supplying the user with interaction methods such as zooming, brushing and linking, annotation and tagging, has attracted increasing attention in scientific literature (Liu, Hong, & Pedersen, 2010), (Pedersen, Gyllstrom, Gu, & Hong, 2010), (Cernea, Truderung, Kerren, & Ebert, 2013), and (Yu & Ingalls, 2011). The overall assumption is that the user’s information seeking process often is divided into separate sessions, and that search histories can help finding the point of discontinuation and ease resuming the interrupted process. The several search sessions that belong together are defined as trails.