Multiform Glyph Based Search Result Visualization

Searching for information on the web is hard; the user may not know what they are looking for, they may refine their search from information gathered by preliminary naive searches, and they may be looking for luminous sites that have many external links so that they can browse further. Information visualization can aid the user in many of these search related tasks. Certainly, the user is familiar with browsing and manipulating the search results through textual style interfaces, but they would gain a better understanding of the information through different presentation methods. Thus, we believe rank ordered lists should be used along-side abstract information visualization presentations. We present a system that displays multiple views of search result information. It provides views for displaying abstract visualization designs using multiform glyphs as well as a ranked text based list. Our engine also retrieves detailed information about the located sites (such as size of page, and quantities of internal and external links); and we describe two glyph designs that display this rich information.