INTEGRATING BROWSING AND SEARCHING WebGlimpse and ScentTrails -Rajesh Golla

Introduction Two paradigms of finding information Searching Browsing Searching Advantages-can find information quickly Disadvantages-inappropriate results

Intro continued Browsing Advantages- useful when keywords cannot be framed Disadvantages – time consuming

WebGlimpse-1997 Idea- not to waste the time and effort spent in reaching a particular page What does WebGlimpse do? 1. Analyze an archive 2. Collect remote pages 3. Compute neighborhoods 4. Add search boxes 5. User search GLIMPSE- search engine

output outputs the title of each matching URL with a link to it It computes the right line number for each match All the matching keywords are highlighted The dates of modification are showed for each file.

Experiment and results Arizona Legislative Information system Archive Query time depended on type of query No difference in whole archive search and neighborhood search refinement of the code – will improve performance

ScentTrails-2003 Information Scent: Information scent is the imperfect, subjective perception of the value, cost or access path of information sources obtained from browsing cues user not certain what he/she is looking for criteria cannot be specified using keywords exact terms used on the Web pages not known browsing useful if most of the information is to be obtained along the path and not just from the final page

ScentTrails user enters list of keywords – representing partial information goal Search results annotated Highlighting Amount of highlighting- information scent algorithm- seven font sizes User navigates using search and browse cues

ScentTrails ScentTrails takes into account the distance or the number of clicks required to reach the relevant page Scent conduits Information scent

Problems with highlighting font size variation had two problems page is distorted the users generally do not know the actual font size

Experiment Study comparing search, browse, ShortScent and ScentTrails 12 subjects 8 tasks of finding information Xerox website Learning effects minimal

results Some tasks amenable to search and some to browsing Search better than browsing ScentTrails better than all the three in task completion time Subjects preferred ScentTrails

conclusions Concept of integrating the two models is useful Find out what kind of highlighting is good for certain contexts Need to run studies across various types of websites

References Manber, U., Smith, M., and Gopal, B., WebGlimpse: Combining Browsing and Searching. In proceedings of the Usenix technical conference, Los Angeles, CA, January Olston, C., Chi, E., ScentTrails: Integrating Browsing and Searching on the Web. ACM transactions on computer-Human Interaction, vol.10, No.3. September 2003, Pages