Bringing order to the Web: automatically categorizing search results

We developed a user interface that organizes Web search results into hierarchical categories. Text classification algorithms were used to automatically classify arbitrary search results into an existing category structure on-the-fly. A user study compared our new category interface with the typical ranked list interface of search results. The study showed that the category interface is superior both in objective and subjective measures. Subjects liked the category interface much better than the list interface, and they were 50% faster at finding information that was organized into categories. Organizing search results allows users to focus on items in categories of interest rather than having to browse through all the results sequentially.

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