Sorting out searching

Abstract

The ideal user interface is comprehensible, predictable, and controllable, but many current textsearch interfaces-especially on the World-Wide Web-involve unnecessarily complex and obscure features. The result is confusion and frustration for advanced users as well as for beginners, scientists, and students [8].Even when a user interface's design is improved, inconsistencies can cause mistaken assumptions and increase the likelihood of failure to find relevant documents as users move from one search system to another. For example, the search string "Hall effect" could produce various searches, including:• Exact match for "Hall effect" • Case-insensitive match for "hall effect" • Best match for "Hall" and "effect" • Boolean match for "Hall" and "effect" • Boolean match for "Hall" or "effect" Few systems spell out the interpretation they are using. Furthermore, systems often use surprising query transformations, unpredictable stemming algorithms, and mysterious weightings for fields. And in many systems, the results are displayed in a relevance ranking whose meaning is a mystery to many users (and sometimes a proprietary secret).

Retrieval features for online databases: common, unique, and expected

“…However, as noted by Shneiderman et al (1998), the current user interfaces are confusing. In addition, systems do not provide interpretation of the retrieval features, and there is a lack of standardization in the text-with-embeddedoperators among the systems.…”

“…Thus users will most likely fail to find relevant items when they move from one system to another. Shneiderman et al (1998) proposed that the user interface design should have a standard structure and terminology for searching while maintaining the distinct features of individual collections and search mechanisms.…”

“…Other than supplying users with help menus, training and advisor facilities are also found to be essential for effective search strategies and need to be incorporated to enhance the effectiveness of the retrieval features for information retrieval (Sutcliffe et al, 2000). Shneiderman et al (1998) suggested that systems should also provide relevance feedback, support for successive queries, and keep track of searches in the history buffer to allow review, alteration, and resubmission of earlier searches. Xie (2003) and Xie and Cool (2000) recommended that retrieval features must allow user control.…”

Linked Data Driven Information Systems as an Enabler for Integrating Financial Data

“…Using entities differs from the standard interaction model for web search: the user specifies keywords which are matched with document contents, and may change the query based on spelling suggestions (Shneiderman et al, 1998). Norman (Norman, 2002) argues that the conceptual model of a system has to fit the user's own conceptual model about it, that is, what the users have to know about the system before interacting with it.…”

“…Since the system computes further possible steps relative to the current result set, only valid choices were offered. Our search and navigation model extended the web search workflow with restriction and navigation operations on entities, rather than the standard web search engine interaction model (Shneiderman et al, 1998) of keyword search, list of documents, spelling correction and iteration. In summary our search and interaction model aimed to facilitate users to freely navigate the information space that spans all available entities, and has the ability to ask queries that go beyond the precision and expressiveness of simple keyword searches.…”