Visual Depictions of Search Results: using glyphs and coordinated multiple-views

Jonathan Roberts, Nadia Boukhelifa, Peter Rodgers have developed a system that can visualize search-result data using glyphs and coordinated multiple-views. They stress a need for a web-search result visualization as the rank-ordered lists of search results allow the user view only a small proportion of the results in a single window. Some of the glyphs show the domain of the site of each webpage (with the addresses: .country, .com, .edu, .org, or .net mapped to triangle, circle, square, parallelogram, hexagon, plus-symbol, respectively), where the rank is allocated a color (with a brighter color representing a higher ranked entity) and the size of the page relates to the border-width of the glyph. Another glyph design is based on quartiles (with the use of color, placement, and concentric rings) and allowed to assign the quantities to the lower, median or upper quartile or represent the measure of external and internal links of a site placement.