Natural Search Pointers – a query formulation method for structured information search

Despite a wide variety of new solutions, structured information search still has only one practical approach – formbased interface. A key limitation of this interface is poor handling of iterative search. While browsing the results users have to memorize all new search constraints, go back to the form, and enter them into the appropriate fields. To overcome this obstacle we created Natural Search Pointers – a structured information search interface, which formulates search queries based on information highlighted by a user while browsing the search results. NSP can be used as an extension of any standard form-based interface for consumer-oriented database search engines. Comparison of traditional form-based interface and its NSP extension shows that in iterative search tasks NSP makes finding information faster and more convenient.