A User Interface for Exploiting Web Communities in Searching the Web

We have implemented a novel user interface for Internet search engines that allows users to visualize the graph neighborhoods of search results returned. When the required information is not in the returned result set, it is likely that there is a path from one or more of the returned documents to another document that has the required information. Our proposed interface allows exploring these paths. We performed experiments to measure user effectiveness in finding desired information with the proposed interface, and compared it with the effectiveness of users restricted to using a traditional interface for the same underlying search engine. Given equal time to perform a set of search tasks, on average, the users of our interface were able to find twice as many of the required documents as the users of the traditional interface. We also found that, on average, users of the proposed interface tried 31% fewer queries per search task.