TermCloud for Enhancing Web Search

We previously proposed a reranking system for Web searches based on user interaction. The system encouraged users to interact with terms in search results or with frequent terms displayed in the tagcloud visualization style. Over 20,000 interaction logs of users were analyzed, and the results showed that more than 70% of users had interacted with the terms in the tagcloud area. Therefore, this visualization style is thought to have great potential in supporting users in their Web searches. This visualization style is referred to as TermCloud in this paper. We describe how TermCloud can increase the effectiveness of users' Web searches, and we propose a technique to generate a more useful TermCloud than the frequency-based TermCloud. Then, we show the usefulness of our method based on the experimental test.